Cattle provide consistency

The hub of the Gooderham’s family run business is at “Myling”, Tulloona, situated halfway between Goondiwindi and Moree, where cropping is the main focus.

The livestock side of the business in recent years has grown considerably, along with Mr Gooderham’s vision of long-term consistency for their enterprise.

The majority of his 700 head crossbred cattle herd is run at “Araluen”, the property they purchased only 12 months ago, where he and his wife Brigette have made their home.

“For three generations of farmers we have concentrated on sowing cotton and barley,” Mr Gooderham said.

“But for me there is a big swing towards the livestock side of the business; it is an important factor in a sustainable farming future.

“This means working with and managing seasonal issues.

“At the end of the day, whether we are talking about being grain producers or grass producers, we are focusing what we are doing on maximising the water we have access to.

“The seasons and climate are strong factors we need to consider in our family business.”

The Gooderham’s enterprise is not a dual-farming operation, they don’t graze any of their farming country.

“We keep both completely separate and we always have,” Mr Gooderham said.

Since the early 2000s the family has been building up its breeding numbers, putting cattle away on agistment to eventually reach the goal of buying more land.

“We had been looking for a long time to take that next step, but land values and where we were at that time didn’t allow us to go out and buy,” Mr Gooderham said.

“But finally we arrived at a time that we could step into a property fully stocked.”

Mr Gooderham said he wears two hats.

The bread and butter of their business is the cropping side, but the grazing side, he believes, will be the most consistent in the long run.

He said each season weaner performance break ups were worked out on the group average.

“We work out what the different ages are and work out the weight gain since birth,” Mr Gooderham said.

“This gives us an average on three breeds whether it’s Angus, crossbred or composite.”

This season the Droughtmaster/ Hicks composite component of the herd are 3.44 per cent above average, Brangus 4.66pc above average, a small number in the herd, the Brah-man/Shorthorn/Angus, are 24.5pc above average, Angus/Hereford are 4.95pc above average, 1.59pc above average are the Angus/Shorthorn and Angus are 1.4pc below average.

“We are constantly harvesting our crops, but with your grass, providing you manage it properly as in soil fertility and grass species, my cows are my harvesters,” Mr Gooderham said.

“My harvesters are out there all the time, regardless of what the season is doing, I can make a conscious decision to project that we might be going into a dry period so I’ll match my stocking rate according.”

He said you won’t get your big returns like you do from grains and cereals, but you’re not investing those big dollars.

“You’ve got millions of dollars tied up there in capital, regardless of what the season is doing, and you have to be able to make those repayments,” he said.

“This year we had 1000 hectares that was put aside for the dry-land cotton.

“We had the deep moisture, but we didn’t have the rain to be able to plant that area for cotton, so we didn’t plant it.”

Mr Gooderham is very conscious of the issues of climate vulnerability.

He said there was going to be times that you couldn’t just put seed in the ground and expect you were going to get the rain to finish the crop.

Continuing their focus on building up breeding herds on agistment and lease country, Mr Gooderham said it would always be an important aspect to their operation as they constantly want to increase their enterprise.

“We are sitting a little stagnant at the moment because of the season, but I believe that we will adapt to a similar sort of approach to the next building phase of our business,” he said.

“I want to grow the business because I am passionate about it.

“I absolutely love agriculture in general, but the livestock industry is my real focus.”

MATT Gooderham says his two properties “Araluen”, Goondiwindi, and “Myling”, Tulloona, don’t have much in common.

“Our Tulloona business is run completely different, it is cropping country and we don’t stock any of that country,” he said.

“But where ‘Araluen’ is, it is suited to fodder crops or grass country; this is why our commercial cattle business is based at ‘Araluen’.”

In an income-based comparative analysis on summer/winter forage, grain barley and grass at “Araluen”, Mr Gooderham was able to project possible outcomes for the year.

Mr Gooderham said for grass returns, worked out on a stocking rate of one cow to 2.83 hectares, producing a calf at an estimate of $500 head, the dollar value per hectare was $180.

“To estimate a dollar return on it we have a ‘flat rate’ of $500 per head for steers and heifers, regardless of whether we keep them for replacement heifers or turn them off,” he said.

“This is a snapshot only, if you were going to do a real life account of what is actually happening, 100 per cent live calf you would be kidding yourself, you are probably more likely looking at 80pc, this is just an estimate with our maximum capacity.

Production on the forage sorghum was from February through till June this year, producing 214 kilograms to the hectare with a return of $1.95 per kg – that equates to $417 per hectare.

“We planted sugar graze in November 2013 and the season didn’t break until the end of January where we had enough sub-soil moisture to start grazing.

“For arguments sake, say the calves went in there at 220kg with the stocking rate and their weight gains we turned off 214kg per hectare.”

This year, his barley crop yielded 0.75 tonne to the hectare based on $300 per tonne this gives an overall projected return of $225 per hectare.