Salt of the Earth Farm Stories
Welcome to "Salt of the Earth - Farm Stories". Host Darren Grigg invites you to step into the world of farmers from diverse backgrounds across Australia. Through intimate interviews, he delves into their farming practices, traditions, and the challenges they face in nurturing the land. From generations-old family farms to innovative sustainable practices, each episode offers a glimpse into the resilience, passion, and dedication of Australian farmers and explores the profound connection between people and the land. Be inspired by the stories of those who sow the seeds of the future.
Salt of the Earth Farm Stories
Ep 97: Andrew Kettlewell _ Mintor Beef
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Andrew Kettlewell grew up in the Riverina town of Jerilderie, but his story stretches a long way beyond the family farm. In this first episode, Andrew shares the early chapters — growing up in the country, chasing opportunities, and the experiences that shaped his path into farm management.
From small-town beginnings to rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in the business world, it’s a fascinating look at how curiosity, hard work and a willingness to say yes can take you a long way.
Welcome to Salt of the Earth Farm Stories, where the heart of farming comes alive.
SPEAKER_00So we sort of buy multi-purpose bulls that can be used to cross heifers and cows. We join at 3%, 3-4% of bulls, so that 240 hefies we joined this year, we put in like 16 bulls.
SPEAKER_01G'day and welcome back. I'm your host, Darren Grigg. Today's guest is Andrew Ketterwell. Born in droolery and country to the core. His story's got some real depth. As a kid, he battled a rare kidney disease. From boarding school to WA playing football, then Marcus Oldham at College, he's never stood still. A world trip takes him to the UK, where he meets a girl, gets married, has a child, and eventually heads home to Australia. That move lands him just north of Aubrey on a property purchased by Linda Mars from one of the world's largest family-owned companies. But this isn't just farming. Linda has a genuine passion for Arabian horses, agriculture and the environment. Nearly 20 years on, Andrew's the farm manager, running a self-replacing Angus herd, while his now ex-wife manages 180 horses and a big team. We talk culling on fertility, short joining periods, stock containment areas, and simple feed systems that work. Andrew's practical, thoughtful, and quietly driven. Here's Andrew Ketterwell. Good morning, Andrew. Good morning. Welcome to uh Tabletop. Magnificent spot too, mate, and thanks for the cupper. We're sitting out underneath one of your favourite regums.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, big gum right near the workshop. Yeah, many, many words of advice have been given under this employees. We always have smoker here because it's better than sitting in the shed. So yeah, love it. Perfect.
SPEAKER_01Mate, where were you born and where did you grow up?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so born out at Druidry. Mum and Dad had a property out there. So grew up out there. Tough times, I must admit. Mum and dad definitely worked hard for every dollar that they earned. That was uh the early early 80s and the 90s. So yeah, went to school at Druidry Public and uh then on to Finley High School and then over to boarding school.
SPEAKER_01Boarding school was where at Scott's?
SPEAKER_00Here in Aubrey, exactly. Yep, did my last three years there and just thrived. I needed to get away. Um, I was a country kid through and through. As soon as I got home off the bus, straight out helping dad. So my education was of low priority at that stage. But then I came across to school and prep and stuff encouraged me to sit down and actually do it versus slip away out onto the into the paddocks. What was your dad doing? So mum and dad had rice, so they grew rice and prime lambs and a bit of winter cropping. Um, but yeah, she's back in those days it was very marginal. They can do a lot more now with direct drilling and spraying and stuff, but it was very marginal. So the irrigation was a lifesaver. Uh, they moved there, I think, 74, and they were there for 40, nearly almost 40 years before they sold. They offered for me to go home, um, but it just it wasn't the right thing. I we would have battled with debt. So it's good that they'd been able to retire and sell the property and retire and enjoy the grandkids and me and my sister, and yeah, enjoyed life a lot more rather than being restricted just to the farm.
SPEAKER_01Was it a difficult transition coming over to boarding school? Like you're in the city of Aubrey in the middle of Aubrey.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, good question. I was I was really sick as a child. I had a kidney disease, so I spent a lot of time in hospitals, and mum and dad tried everything available to try and help me with my nephrotic syndrome. So And what's that, mate? What is that? So you you retain your fluid. So I used to swell up like a like a puff of fish, and um I couldn't pass protein, so it would build up, and then I'd need to go down to hospital and get put on some drugs, and then it would release. And um, yeah, my hands would swell up to a point where it almost felt like they were gonna pop and your belly and everything. You just retained your fluid, so you kept drinking, but you didn't release anything. So it was pretty ordinary there for many years. Mum and dad tried everything, and and I'm grateful for everything they did. That's probably why I'm so healthy now. I sort of grew out of that disease late, I'd say late puberty, which was quite like late in my teens, and I've never looked back. I don't know whether it made my body stronger. But uh Joe Olomu, the rugby player, he also had it. So yeah, it was tolling on the family, my sister, she spent a lot of time with dad at home, and mum and I would be away at hospital. So yeah, it was tolling time, especially for them financially, I'd say, because yeah, not every dollar was easily come by in those days. Jeez, mate, look at you now. Wow, stronger than ever. They say now when you're in your 40s to 50s, your health is your wealth. So I may not be wealthy, but I'm healthy.
SPEAKER_01Way to go, mate. Uh after Scott School in Aubrey, you went down to Marcus Alden?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So I had a couple of years out to mature. I was still just a young lad. I went back to Druildry and worked for a few places around there and worked a bit at home and then went down to Marcus. Dad's an old Marcus boy. So went down there, loved it, thrived the first year, worked bloody hard, got some amazing, amazing marks. And then the second year I went to Western Australia. Three mates and I went over there. Two of them were very, very talented footballers, and we played for Nowangra up, which is just south, sort of southeast of Perth. And because they were so good, the footy footy team lifted. I think they were around the bottom, and and we ended up being uh third on the ladder. So in those little communities, when the footy club's doing well, the town's doing well, and everyone loved these two lads. So I just tagged along, played a bit of my own footy, but not to the level these two fellas did. And we got to play with a lot of extremely talented indigenous people, and they were unbelievable, just their abilities. We played with Willie Farmer, he was in his 50s by then, and he still could get as many touches as anybody and have an impact on the game. So yeah, it was a lovely year, and the the town embraced us. Like all Western Australia, they're very community oriented, and we had such an awesome year. Then I came back to Marcus in my third year, right? And then after leaving Marcus, I worked for Melbourne Water. So we went on an excursion to Melbourne Water, which is the Melbourne sewage farm. Peter Nolan was the manager there, and I just loved it. Like just outskirts of Melbourne, they're rotationally grazing. There's 20,000 acres there, and they had 20,000 cattle and I think nearly a hundred thousand sheep.
SPEAKER_01This is off the waste off the sewage plant.
SPEAKER_00You're exactly correct. So at that stage they'd turned over to filtrate in the waste. It wasn't direct, like back in the day, it used to just be the waste would go straight onto the soil, but they um found a filtration through all the all the dams down there. I don't know if anybody's ever been down there, but it's unbelievable what's on the southern part of the Melbourne Geelong Road that you just don't know that it's in there. So worked there for two years and gained a massive knowledge, and it's a it was a big group of people. A lot of them had been there a long time, so sort of taught me a lot about getting put into your place. So yeah, I was called the pup because I was just out of school. But uh, I had all these big ideas of how I was going to change the place, and I quickly got put it back into place.
SPEAKER_01Out of interest, then, the liquid waste from a sewage plant for irrigating pasture land, is there good nutrients in it?
SPEAKER_00Well, they used to put sewerage directly onto the soil, but then it got to a point where there was imagine all the chemicals that get put put out down the sewer. So they were having a lot of heavy metal issues and the EPA were all over them. So it was going through a sort of a 12 or a 15-pond stage. So the water coming out the end that was actually going on to the paddocks when at the at the end of when I kind of left, it was almost drinkable.
SPEAKER_01Really?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because they use all that water now for South Wereby, all those horticultural properties down there. And I drove to Geelong this weekend and saw the Wereby, well, not Wereby Ag as it was as it was called back then. The farm's still there and they're growing a lot of corn, so it's it's all changed, but it was just a hub, like we were turning off animals in weeks, like the grass just grew unbelievably, and sort of being in that Geelong Melbourne part there was very dry, like it's a real rain shadow there, but used to blow gear blows through that country. But yeah, so that was great, great learning curve.
SPEAKER_01And after that, where did you head to?
SPEAKER_00Well, I lived in St Kilda, so I had the nightlife at night, and then I'd go the opposite way to the traffic out to Weraby. So then I headed overseas to do my round the world trip. Got a round the world ticket, had a working visa for the US and and the UK, and got to the UK, and pretty well that's that's where the story ended. I met my what is my ex-wife now in Northampton. I was working for a little contractor, and then we had a child, and I that's where my career then started in IT.
SPEAKER_01So Oh, so you were doing IT in the UK?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so five years we were there. We got married, we bought a house, we had Poppy, who's my daughter, and I was working for an IT company, absolutely smashing it. We because everybody has a cousin that lives in Melbourne or Sydney, when you rang up on the phone, cold calling. It wasn't like cold calling these days where everyone just hangs up on you. People actually did give you a little bit of time a day, but you had a di a point of difference being Australian, and obviously my strong Australian accent stood out. So I built some good relationships and had some phenomenal customers. Um, but then we go back to why we ended up coming back to Australia. So and sorry, was your wife then was she from here originally? No, so Amanda's fully English, born and bred, so yeah, her family and everything were there. So we had an amazing life, and then we got this message from a lady. So many, many years ago, my mum was the nanny to the Mars family when they came out here to um build the Wadonga factory, and um my parents every year write a Christmas letter, and they obviously send the Christmas letter to the Mars family because they're great, great friends with them. So at our wedding, uh, a um horse came into church. Amanda's horse came into church and put on the floor, and so I became a part of the the Christmas letter that particular year. It got sent around the world to all mum and dad's different people, and we got this message saying that Linda would like to meet with us. So this is Linda Mars. Yeah, so she just bought a property out here in Australia where we are today, and she was looking for some managers. And at the time, Amanda's a very, very passionate horsewoman, an extraordinarily good horsewoman. She could see that there were the two two very good people potentially she could get as a farm manager and as a horse manager. So we came out for Poppy's Christening in 2007, and we came over to what now is Osa Arabians. It was Kelkep Park Arabians, but is now Osa Arabians, and it was the end of the drought in 2007. It was it wasn't a picture you can imagine, but we're underneath the amazing tabletop rock here, and the sun was shining on it, and uh the old owner called out. We went into this paddock and she called out, and these 80 Arabs just came from nowhere with their heads held high and their big flowing tails, and and it was quite amazing, and and then we went back to the UK and we ummed an art about whether we'd come out here to Australia. And at the time we we were doing really well in the UK financially and we had a good life, but I don't know, part of me always wanted to come back to Australia and Linda said to us, Well, if it doesn't work, I'll get you over to Australia, and if it doesn't work out, I'll get you back there. So here we are 20 well, 19, 18 years later, uh still still here.
SPEAKER_01And mate, how does this feel? Like the Mars family, it's quite an incredible story. I think from the early 1900s, Frank Mars learned how to hand dip chocolate from his mother in her own kitchen while he's at home with polio, I think. And they're one of the biggest family-owned companies in the world. And you're working for Linda Mars, mate. How does this feel?
SPEAKER_00It's an honour. She gave me a chance uh back in 2008 as a 28-year-old young lad who wanted to get his feet into agriculture. Very difficult to get that opportunity these days. She's been phenomenal support, but she's also lived away. So the farm and everything, all the decisions have been purely down to Amanda and I over the last 18 years. We've grown it to what it is today. Yeah, just to be given an opportunity by somebody like that. And I would say she's been a mentor. Some of the chats we've had have been deep and meaningful over the years. Yeah, it's been an honor to work for her, and I'll I'll continue to work for her for many more years as long as there's a job here for me.
SPEAKER_01And she uh comes and visits frequently?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so we get to see Linda probably twice a year. She had a run of COVID, obviously. We didn't see her for quite a few years, but this place is her passion, her hobby, and her love. We may not see her very often, but yeah, we know that uh we're we're only a very small cog in a very, very, very big machine. So we yeah, we just do what we can for our little part.
SPEAKER_01So this is called Mentor LLC.
SPEAKER_00You're correct. So uh the Mars family are very passionate people. So Mentor was, from my understanding, Linda's first Eccle Techie horse. So they like to keep names continuing on. So we're known as Mentor LLC, obviously American-owned business, so we're an LLC Limited Liability Company, which is a bit different to the PLC and PTYs here in Australia. So that's the beef side and what the company is. The beef side is mentor beef, the parent company is mintor, and then the horse side of the business is Osa Arabians. So okay, and how many acres here? Uh so as of today, there's just on 6,000. There's a 2,000 acre bush block that was just acquired of in the last sort of 12 months, which uh we're looking at potentially putting into conservation trust because Linda's a massive advocate for this area. Um and the tabletop range and the Bernamba range, it's just a beautiful part, and especially the tabletop rocket it's just phenomenal. When you see it in the morning with the sun coming up when it's green, there's not a better sight you you can see. And a lot of people don't really know it's here because they're sort of tucked down where we are.
SPEAKER_01And your ex-wife's do an incredible job, I believe, managing the horse side of things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, massive job, huge job. So they've got 160 odd horses, 14, 15 employees at times, and they're competing internationally and here in Australia. So yeah, we we it's been challenging times. I won't deny that, and we will still have challenging times. But we're both just so passionate about our two sides of the business and working for Linda. She's just been yeah, if if everyone could get an employer like Linda, you'd be very lucky.
SPEAKER_01I can see that you're both passionate, mate, and I'm going to get to your side of farming in a sec. But going back to the horses, you've travelled a bit too in international competitions?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so 2014 we went to Normandy to watch our first international race. So that was run on the beaches of Normandy. So we've got endurance horses. Well, the farmer has endurance horses, Linda has endurance horses. So endurance horses is long distance racing. So the Australian championships is a Tom Quilty, which we're lucky to win on its 50th year back in 2010. So endurance isn't huge here in Australia, but overseas it's a lot in Europe, and obviously the Arabs do it a lot in the desert. So we went to Normandy, and then that fired something in the belly to then become part of the international scene. So we were doing extremely well here in Australia, and then the opportunity came to go overseas. So we sent a couple of horses to many different events, and then in 2018 I became the chef to keep, so the Australian team manager, and yeah, we've campaigned a lot of horses. The Australian team in Slovakia were fourth. We unfortunately missed out on the bronze. And then last year, my daughter Poppy rode an Oso horse, which lives in Europe, but is trained by well, owned and trained by the farm. She got 10th junior in the world, so she's been a huge part of the story as well, Poppy. She's been um there from day day dot, and then Amanda and I have a son, Jack, and um he's probably not as passionate about the horses as what Poppy is, but he's he's an avid water polo man, he's a very talented goalkeeper, so look out.
SPEAKER_01They both love this sport. How old are they now?
SPEAKER_00Poppy's just finished year 12, so she had a huge year last year. So she's 18, she's working back on the farm, and while she decides what she wants to do with her next few, well, next chapter of her story, and Jack's in year eight, and he's also at Scott, so he's following in my footsteps. He's a border there. I know we're just outside of um Aubrey, but he needed a bit of uh structure and a bit of prep like I probably didn't get when I lived at home. So he's got that discipline, so and he's loving it. Absolutely loves it.
SPEAKER_01And does Amanda does she compete internationally too on horseback?
SPEAKER_00No, Amanda's never competed internationally on horseback. She's done a couple of rides, but not at sort of the championships. She's a trainer and just uh keeps her home fires burning and makes sure everybody's uh safe. Awesome.
SPEAKER_01So getting back to your farm operation here, what are you running here, mate?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so mintour beef, self-replacing Angus Herb. When Linda first purchased the original block, we inherited a Murray Grey stud, which was interesting. So we ran the Murray Grey stud for a little while. Beautiful cattle, but we only sold a couple of bulls each year, and to run a stud, as we know, costs a lot of time and effort. So that just became a commercial, and we still have a few running around here just to keep Linda happy because she's a very big advocate of the Murray Grey. Um, so yeah, a uh Angus replacing herd.
SPEAKER_01Did that transition change when you know Angus became more popular? I think McDonald's promoted Angus very well.
SPEAKER_00Whoever did that with the Angus Society deserves a gold medal. Like we were getting 30 cents a kilo less for the Murray Grays, they're consuming the same amount of food and husbandry costs, and it was just frustrating, very frustrating. And I know there's still a lot of advid Hereford breeders that are still holding on, and I know some of them are getting just as good a money, but the day-to-day money isn't there, and Angus Society's just steamed ahead. And a real credit to the board, they've done a phenomenal, phenomenal job.
SPEAKER_01Do you think uh cattle are a bit like tractors? You're either you're red or you're black, or you're green or you're red.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, good. Yeah, that's that's a great comment. Yeah, and I I love our our cows. Um when we purchased this big block back in 2013, it came with a a mob of cattle. It probably kept us going in the Angus direction, but um you're either a a black or a red or a or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Well, I can hear a tractor in the background coming up behind us now. I'm interested to know what colour that's gonna be, mate.
SPEAKER_00Green, everything here is green, just the service, Hutchin and Pierce. I'll give them a plug-in, Aubrey offer. I I know we're really close to town, but just next level. I'm so shocked. Like some people say machinery dealers don't look after you. Holy doolly, they're out here. We've got a number of gators, we have a number of international girls working here, as you imagine. So machinery probably isn't taken the best care of, but second to none service. There you go.
SPEAKER_01Well, my brothers and my father say the same thing. They say you've got to be seen in green, and that's goes right down to the right on MOA.
SPEAKER_00Probably. We're not down to that level, but yeah, we've got a lot of green here.
SPEAKER_01So, self replacing herdmaids, how many would you be running here?
SPEAKER_00In a normal year, we'd run six to seven hundred, and this year we're down to five hundred. We've had twenty four months of tough, just tough, just haven't got the rain. We're a good solid 600 mil. We're at that typical whole brook. Aubrey country, like you get your 600 mils or more generally, but we just we're down to 440, I think, over one year, and we wouldn't be far behind that the year before. Just challenging years. We've pulled the numbers right back because Linda's very passionate about her soil and her conservation and looking after the farm. So you can hear the mixer going now. Everything's been bought into containment areas. So we invested heavily in a mixer and containment areas, and we're just letting the farm recover. So we won't let anything out. We've had some good rain now. We we've had 26 mils. I know a lot of other people have had a lot more, but we will keep them in containment until we have a good bank of feed ahead of us. I'm not letting them out until we do have that. Yes, we have a lot of country, but we have a lot of marginal country here as well. A lot of hills, a lot of rocks, a lot of gullies. We're not your sort of typical flat, really good whole brook country. We have got some of that country, don't get me wrong, but we have a lot of marginal country as well. And we've got a lot of horses as well that cover a good part of it.
SPEAKER_01I know you're very passionate about containment areas, and you've got a few different setups here that have been quite interesting. In fact, I've seen you on a video recently, mate, uh explaining it very well. But the main idea behind containment feeding is to not trash those paddocks out there and so it recovers quicker, and then you can bring them in closer and a tighter area, which might be, I believe, about five acres maximum, and then you will control their food and nutrients from there. Is that how it works?
SPEAKER_00You're exactly right there. We used to feed hay on the ground, and then those tougher years we fed a lot of canola and a lot of vetch, and we're losing most of it in them walking into the ground. So we've always kept them in smaller areas, but we've gone to the next level now where we're actually got a mixer and feeding into troughs, so there's no wastage. So the whole reason for bringing them in is cattle, when they're hungry, wander. You'll just see them wander from one end of the paddock to the other, and they're just burning energy. Where if we've got them in a small controlled environment and their bellies are full, we're like, we're feeding a lot of straw, so they're not getting a lot, but they're in magnificent order. There's no point having all this beautiful country, and we always get a big rain. We always get a big rain in January, February, and this country just washes because we've got a lot of hills, steep hill country, it just washes, so you're better off having that ground cover, slowing the water down, and then that water filtrates into the soil better, so you just get a more a better bank of water, and it just makes sense, and we're able to keep them in these little paddocks. Easy to check water, easy for animal husbandry as well, because pink eye is probably my biggest vein of my life at the moment. We're okay now, but every year we get an outbreak of pink eye. I don't know if it's mutating every year or we have a strain that isn't covered by the vaccine. I got a message to say from the neighbour that potentially there's a company that can make vaccinations, so you take them some of your ants, well, a couple of active virus, ones that have active virus, and then they can make a vaccine from that. So that's something we're going to look into.
SPEAKER_01Well, that sounds quite exciting. But can you tell me about some of your feeding systems? I've seen some very elaborate ones, but you've told me they don't have to be that elaborate.
SPEAKER_00Well, you can go all out. You can go all out. Um, but we've got probably my favourite is this sort of six, seven hundred mil hot wire off from the fence, and we run along with the feed wagon. Um, it's a osmix mixer and it just puts it straight over this hot wire and they put their heads under underneath it.
SPEAKER_01So and they're not trampling on it then.
SPEAKER_00No, that's 100% is. See, all you've got to do with cows is stop them trampling on it. Pooing, trampling on it. We know what they're like with dams. So that's what they do with their feet. They just for some reason have to walk in it. But if you can just keep them away from it and um it's cheap. A hot wire and a few insulators, it's it's very easy. And the other one we've got is belting, so mining belting, and in 50 meter lengths, it's probably 1100 wide belting.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we'd run a hot wire straight over the top of it, feeder feeds one side and the feed goes on top and bounces and so once again the hot wires to stop them walking over the belting and they'll feed from either side. You've got space to get the feeder in, and they all get a enough tucker each.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, probably one of the biggest things I learned. We had a field day, hosted a field day here the other day with about 120 producers looking at containment feeding, and one thing we need to probably improve is having to go in the paddock with the animals because we're just probably losing 15 minutes a day. We plan to feed for 120 days, which from the first of January took us to the end of April. We're probably just losing a bit of time going in there. So if you can come up with a system where you can feed over the fence, but hot wires, all you need's hot wires, cows respect them as long as they're respectful animals. Our herd is very respectful for hotwires, you can achieve anything. So back to our Angus herd. Another thing that I'm extremely proud of is our joining period. Sort of around this area, it's always been six to eight weeks. So we now carve over a one-cycle period, so a three-week period. Uh it's taken us a little while to get to that point, just through joining heifers, probably a little bit earlier than the cows, and just only culling on fertility. So our herd is extremely fertile. So I'll give you an example. We joined 240 heifers this year. We got 180 that were in the first cycle, so the first three weeks, and then the others were in the second cycle, we sold them for two and a half thousand dollars, and then the first cycles we just went through and culled out whatever we didn't like from there. My my theory is if if you've got a six-week joining period, you've got two weeks at the start, you'll get a few early ones, so that makes it eight weeks, and then you always get some late ones. So you're up to potentially ten weeks of carving, and the difference in calf size is amazing. And also, we were a sort of mid-spring carving and August carving, late August, but by the time you have your first calf and your last calf, you're pushing into October. So we've actually brought our calving through to the end of July because I feel in the first month the calf isn't utilising a lot of grass. Mum's not utilising a lot of grass. So when we hit September, is when we have our maximum growth. I've got baby and mum utilising every ounce of grass. I think sometimes when carve a little bit too late, we're not utilising all our spring feed. Yes, people are cutting hay, but it costs money to put hay into silage or into bales. Yeah, it's just trying to streamline things.
SPEAKER_01This culling on fertility sounds quite interesting, but the selection of bulls plays a big role too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. We buy probably two, three bulls to that cocky, his annoyance one. Um, we buy a couple of bulls every year with tabletop Angus. Love Tim and Jessica Scott down there at Tabletop. Well, next door, I should say, not down there.
SPEAKER_01Well, you'll hear them on an earlier episode, actually, mate.
SPEAKER_00Tim speaks for a couple of episodes. Oh, does he? There we go. I haven't listened that far back. So we sort of buy multi-purpose bulls that can be used to cross heifers and cows. We join at 3%, 3-4% of bulls. So that 240 heifers we joined this year, we put in like 16 bulls, and then as the go further down the joining, we take two or three out every week just because they start getting a bit bored and a bit fighty, as we can say, because there's not as many females to uh to get around. But I don't mind having a few bulls because I know they're a nightmare for 10 months of the year and the two months, and also a big thing with me is not letting your bulls get too big. You see thousand kilo bulls, it's you can't expect a thousand kilo bulls to go from paddock fitness to joining 30, 40 cows in a couple of weeks. So we run our bulls tight, so it's sort of nothing more than 4.2 birth weight on the index for at the Angus Society, and also management of your heifers, don't let them get too fat in that last trimester. Last year we didn't pull a single one, I think the year before we might have pulled one, and that was because it was backwards. But management of heifers I understand a lot of people run a lot of different enterprises within one enterprise, but this is all I do, so I want to specialise in it. So I try and make everything, yeah. So people are probably saying, Oh, it's easy to do this, easy to do that, but this is all I do, this is my job. So I try and get it as close to perfect as I can.
SPEAKER_01Well, you're doing a very good job, mate, but it's quite detailed now, isn't it? You know, when you're looking at your IMFs and your all your different bull selections and fertility rates.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it sometimes you can get bogged down in too much. Like we've got an Optiway, which is in paddock wane. So technology, I love technology. So we've got, we were one of the first people to introduce Farmbot for tank monitoring. We've got pump controllers, we've got rain gauges all on farm bot. Our subscription is next level, but the amount of time it saves going and checking troughs or pumps or anything is just unbelievable. I can be sat in a cafe in Melbourne drinking my latte and I can turn a pump on. It is next level on my phone. It is unbelievable. And the OptiWay is the same thing. You're getting live data all the time, every morning. It's the first thing I do. The report comes in at four o'clock in the morning of what happened the day before. Six o'clock when my alarm goes off. It's the first thing I look at. I know you're not meant to look at your phone first thing, but that's what I do. So technology.
SPEAKER_01But what are you reading there, mate? So tell us how it works. So the cattle have got uh an ear tag and they come up for a feed of perhaps a lick block or something, is it?
SPEAKER_00You're exactly right. So they call it a lolly. So we just put a molasses-based lick block to encourage them in there. They go into this small sort of box that's out in the paddock with a solar panel up and they've all got an NLIS tag, so they walk in there, only their front feet are weighed, which is quite extraordinary. They've been able to put together an algorithm that doesn't require the back feet. So if that animal goes on there 20 times a day, it doesn't matter, it takes that particular animal's average for the day, it doesn't measure it 20 times and say, well, he's done two kilos a day, that means the whole flock has. So at the moment, 20% of our wieners go on there per day, well, in this particular mob. So not everyone goes on there every day. It's it is quite interesting. You'd think everyone would want to go on there, but they don't.
SPEAKER_01What sort of alarms might you be getting? Do you see some weight loss at some point or great weight gain from a particular feed?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. At the moment, the containment area and the weights are just making sure they're doing okay. So amazing thing was we we had them all, they're ticking along at one kg a day. I thought, gee, we're good farmers, we're good farmers. And then we took them into the yards, one of those 45 degree days. We got them in early, they got belted round the yards, we gave them a vaccination and a drench, and then I put them back out in it for a week they were like three, two, three hundred grams. I'm like, oh no, we've we've destroyed them. But putting cattle through a yard, you don't realise how much it upsets the herd, and they get belted around and they're only sort of 300 kilo things. So when you're pushing them through yards, ones are getting jammed, and it's just a disturbing environment. And unless I had the opt-way, I I wouldn't have known how important just leaving cattle to be cattle is. I know a lot of people get them in monthly to weigh them, but you're belting them around in the crash, and there's always one that gets jammed behind a gate or stress alone, I guess. Yeah, exactly. And now that they've relaxed, they've come back, the drenchers probably kicked in, the vaccines probably kicked in, and they're back to 1.1, 1.2 kgs. And at the moment, based on the sort of feeder price of around five, four dollars eighty-five dollars a kilo, I'm happy because it's only costing us sort of a dollar eighty-five per head per day to feed them. So we've got our budget, we're sticking with our budget. So our budget runs for 120 days, they're the things you go to Linda with. So I said to her back in December, I said, Linda, things aren't looking amazing over here. This is our forecast, this is our plan. And typical Linda just supports 100%. So it's gonna cost just on$200,000 to feed all these cattle. Yeah, as long as there's a fact and a figure, and I think you need to have trigger points. So if we reach our 90th day, which is probably not far away, and we haven't had rain, we've had rain now, so I'm a little bit more confident. You can make decisions where if you just don't have a plan, I think you can become a bit unstuck.
SPEAKER_01That's part one with Andrew Ketterwell from Geraldary to the UK and back. Endurance writing to building a serious Angus program. Plenty in that one. But in part two, we go deeper. Clean stockwater and bore water that is next level. What good farm management really looks like, his approach to staff, work life balance, and raising young kids on the land. Plus, their worm farm producing liquid fertiliser for healthier plants, healthier soils, healthier animals. It's a Ripper. Join us for part two.