ON FARM NATIONAL SNAPSHOT: OUR BUSINESS: Lynda and The Brook Station has been in Darcy’s family for 30 years. My family actually owned the property when I was small Darcy O’Brien, and we sold it to Darcy’s family in the early 1980s. We run Basalt, Queensland Brahman cross-breeders, and some cattle on agistment l from time to time – from 6,000 to 8,000 head. Over the past 10 years we’ve developed the property, going from nine to 65 paddocks and installing 70 or 80 additional watering points. Water is now within two kilometres of every animal. We use an electric fence cell system to ACTIVITIES rotate the cattle through thirty 100ha paddocks. OVER THE NEXT WHAT’S ON OUR PLATE: TWO MONTHS: As a result of the developments we’ve undertaken, we > Bring on new management can now run larger numbers, but our management needs staff. To move to the next Area: to be more precise. The task is to monitor our grazing level it’s important the 21,000ha plan and plan a clear outcome for each mob. This is our business has dependable, Enterprise: third year doing feed budgeting. Operationally, we’ve high quality people who Breeding, backgrounding processed our entire herd with mustering, weaning and can work with a level and agistment pregnancy testing. They’ve been separated into three of autonomy. mobs: dry, grower and breeder. > Set things up from Livestock: OUR GO-TO TOOLS AND RESOURCES: a human resources Brahman cross-breeding cows We’ve just started using the MaiaGrazing platform as perspective, using Pasture: an alternative to paper-based systems to track grazing an organisation chart Kangaroo, black spear, management. We also work closely with [natural resource to define roles and giant black, blue and Indian management group] NQ Dry Tropics to build our responsibilities and couch grasses capabilities with projects and skill-building workshops. I creating a policies and recently completed The Right Mind on Communication with procedures system. Soil: > Follow the grazing plan Northern basalt (red/black) Jill Rigney, which was the best workshop I’ve ever done. and measure outcomes Rainfall: Lynda O’Brien with the walk-over- 690mm lyndajobrien@gmail.com weighing system. SNAPSHOT: MY BUSINESS: Will, Simone and My family was originally from Mungindi and moved down to take over a few of the pine leases before they Mandy Onus, were planted, running sheep. The pine plantations were Adjungbilly, NSW establishing around the same time that the bottom fell out Sl of the wool market, so we migrated into cattle. Around 2016, I saw what people were getting for lambs and got into Merino sheep in a big way then. We have a unique arrangement in our business in that we use a lot of contractors. We have our own equipment but use the contractors for farm work, rather than having full- time staff. This allows us to concentrate manpower when it’s required because we’ve freed up capital and invested in equipment. Area: WHAT’S ON MY PLATE: ACTIVITIES 2,630ha plus 4,850ha of We’re setting up our breeding stock to maintain condition OVER THE NEXT state forest lease throughout the next few months. This involves feeding, TWO MONTHS: Enterprise: stock rotations and spelling pastures to establish a feed Steers and wool production wedge and make sure we’re in a good position once we > Weed control. start lambing and calving. We’ve also bought a drone and > Lambing and calving early Livestock: tried it out for mustering in the forest for the first time. September. 1,700 Angus breeders and > Infrastructure and capital 5,000 Merino ewes We’ve completed pregnancy scanning our sheep. We’re works – fencing and doing some clean-out sprays to protect the investment repairing yards. Pasture: that the pastures and grazing crops represent. We’re not Phalaris, clover, summer- croppers by any stretch – we’re just trying to run as many active natives, grazing crops cattle as we can and if we’re not getting the return on our Soil: investment, we will come unstuck. Granite, red basalt Will Onus MY GO-TO TOOLS AND RESOURCES: will.onus@gmail.com Rainfall: We use AgriWebb diligently; it’s a really handy tool for 830mm everyone in the business to be on the same page. I’m also a big fan of the MLA market reports and forecasts. 19