McCrohon family to reserve champion in Beef Spectacular Feedback Trial

The Holbrook couple's team of five Angus/Shorthorn steers scored a total of 783.5 points, only five points behind the winning team.

"I know the cross works well for what we do," Mr McCrohon said.

The top carcase in the team scored a whopping 94 points from a possible 110.

It weighed 343.5 kilograms with a P8 fat of 15mm, rib fat of 7mm, a marble score of 2, and an MSA Index of 62.28.

The McCrohons operate a commercial herd of predominantly Angus females and joined 330 females last year.

The Angus females include bloodlines such as Ardrossan Nectar, Knowla So Right and Landfall Newground via their fixed-time artificial insemination program.

The family had "played around", using a Yanco Shorthorn bull on these to produce the crossbred steers.

The three McCrohon children, Annabelle, Harriet and George, also operate a small Angus stud, called Billabong Angus.

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As first-time entrants, the McCrohons said it was great to receive so much performance information.

"I think the opportunity to get the feedback on the kill data is really exciting," Mrs McCrohon said.

After seeing their results, Mr McCrohon was gobsmacked.

"I think on the performance, the cattle did really well and I guess an area to improve on is our marbling. IMF is something we have been thinking about," Mrs McCrohon said.

"It was a bit of reassurance that what we have got, and where we are going is the right direction, it is a bit of a confirmation of what we are doing. We probably achieved a hell of a lot higher than what we expected which makes round two pretty much impossible to improve on," he said.

"Definitely there is focus on improving the carcase traits for us. The growth is there but we are just missing a few carcase traits that would round us out a bit more, but we are already on that journey," Mrs McCrohon said

This was nothing new to Mr McCrohon who worked with JBS for about 19 years in the company's feedlots.

"It is exciting for Will to be able to put that knowledge from a corporate business in to the family business," Mrs McCrohon said.

"We have a reasonable knowledge on export markets and customer requirements so we are getting a basis of where we are."

Planning to focus more on seedstock, the McCrohons were planning to breed more pure Angus.

"We have been on a journey in the last couple of years to go from steer backgrounding to breeding with our kids and we are very interested in bull sales and EBVs and genetics. And we have just been trying to get a plan to improve our herd," Mr McCrohon said.

"We have been through a consolidation of getting the cattle we want and we have been culling quite heavily on fertility and anything structural, just trying to get a real base herd and we have been using a lot of black bulls to do that."

Mr McCrohon said he would further assess the females through genomics and continue to look for improvement in the herd.

They were also tissue sampling all their heifers to get a picture of the make-up of their herd.

"I do the background stuff with the genetics and animal husbandry, but it is actually Will's knowledge of feedlots and customers. He probably knew those steers would feed really well," Mrs McCrohon said.