A New Wool Sweater and a Wagyu Steak to go with it

July 5, 2010

We left Duval College in Armidale today. Our first stop was 25 km east of Armidale, to a family farm. It was amazing! They had 20,000 acres, 12,500 head of Merino ewes with a total of 20,000+ sheep on the place, and 800 head of angus cows on the side. We learned a lot about wool there! They produce wool anywhere from 13 to 17 microns, which if you knew wool that is very fine! They had two shearing barns one was 100 years old and the newest one was built in 2002. They made some improvements that made shearing easier and cleaner for everyone!

All the ewes are ultrasounded and sorted whether they have twins, a single or are dry. From there, they feed them accordingly. The ewes also all have two tags, an electronic tag & a regular tag. The regular tags are different colors depending on the range of their wool fibers. On the electronic tag, they record sires, birth weights, birthing difficulty, microns, etc.
It was all quite interesting!

More to come,

Becky

As Becky mentioned we left Armidale today to continue taking tours of the ag industry. After lunch we headed north towards Glen Innes and Rangers Valley Cattle Station. This is a 12,000 acre station/farm/feedlot operation. Gram "Grub" Mabbott gave us a tour of the feedlot section of the place. They are currently feeding 22,000 head of stears; mostly angus with some Wagyu - holstein crosses. The angus spend about 270 days on feed while some of the Wagyus spend up to 450 days on feed! They source all of their cattle from the southern part of New South Wales and don't buy any cattle from a sale yard.

Besides the cattle they have in the feedlot. They grow about 3,000 steers on pasture until they are ready to go on feed. of the 12,000 acres, they farm about 5,000 acres raising various crops including corn. This is the first station I've seen that raised corn. They are able to produce about 50% of their own corn silage. One silage pit we saw was 133 meters long and 35 wide!

Several things are different over here from how we do it in the states. The first is that they mix all feed in "batch boxes" instead of in the feed truck. This helps make feeding faster because a ration is usually waiting to be loaded whenever a truck pulls up to get it. The next thing is that it is the feedlot's responsibility to wash the cattle before they are shipped to slaughter. This is very time consuming as they can usually only wash about 120 head per day, sometimes less if they are really dirty.

Although we only met "Grub", Rangers Valley employs 42 people including millers, mechanics, pen riders, and pen cleaners. We got to climb a tower on site and got some really good pictures of the feed lot.

I could keep going into detail but then this blog would be more like a book. Tomorrow we are headed to tour a research station, another station with a bull raising operation, but you'll have to log on tomorrow to see how that went.

Wade