Damian Moore has spent his life seeing black-and-white dairy cattle grazing the paddocks of the family farm.
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But as the years have gone on, there is more black added to the mix, and the family's Angus herd brings plenty of beef to complement their dairy operation.
Mr Moore runs Moore Partnership with his wife Maria, and his parents Pat and Norma Moore, at Yarram, Victoria.
The family farm has always been a dairy, but they have continued to build, including adding more beef to the mix for a very good reason.
"We tend to run the beef cattle where it's too far to walk the dairy cattle," he said.
They tried a number of beef breeds before settling on Angus, mostly due to the premium for the breed. But there are still traits Mr Moore wants to see in his Angus cows.
"I'm really looking for moderate cow weights, low birthweights and short gestations, but good growth rates and intramuscular fat (IMF) and eye muscle area (EMA)," he said.
With this in mind, he has sourced bulls from a number of studs, including Lawsons Angus, Yea.
"They have focused on those traits. We sampled fairly heavily from Lawsons Momentous M518. We have had a couple of bulls by him and they have performed very well. We can see it now when we are processing a lot of cattle and getting feedback on the IMF and EMA side of things."
The Moores have also sourced bulls from Bowman Performance Genetics, Neerim South, in the past couple of years.
"(Glenn Bowman) loves some feedback on the bulls. He is great to deal with."
Mawarra Genetics, Longford, is another stud the Moore family chooses for Angus sires.
"Their bulls are improving every year. I bought some really nice sons of Dunoon Prime Minister this year."
Today the Moores run about 300 Angus breeders, which are joined from the start of June for an autumn calving.
"An autumn calving suits the sales down in this area, with weaner sales down here in the autumn. It's something we've always traditionally done, and it helps our workload a bit. We have predominantly spring calving in the dairy herd."
And the Angus herd has caused them very few headaches at calving time.
"I've found with the Angus, since we've focused on those traits, we haven't had any calving trouble," he said.
"I haven't pulled a calf for three or four years, and that's including this year when we calved 75 heifers."
Calves are weaned at nine to 10 months, both paddock- and yard-weaned. During weaning, the Moores pick the elite heifers to keep as future breeders.
"We look at their parentage, but we look at size and conformation of them also."
About 100 steers and surplus heifers are sold in the third week of February at a feature sale in Leongatha. Often they are bought by feedlots. The remaining 150 smaller steers and heifers are fed on crops until they are sold into the Greenham's Never Ever Beef program at about 18 to 22 months old and weighing 600 to 700 kilograms.
"They have to be humanely handled, no use of antibiotics, and not fed on grain to go into the Never Ever program. It's great to hear the feedback from them. We are also finishing most of the secondary cattle, and it is good to get feedback on those, because it will give you an indication of how the better 100 steers that we sold in the autumn store sales have gone."
With their Angus herd thriving, it looks like black cattle will continue to dot the Moores' paddocks for years to come.
