Taranga’s crossbreeding goal

KEN Jeppesen, Taranga, Bloomsbury has a focus on crossbreeding in his 800 breeder-strong Brahman-based breeding herd, and said the February All Breeds sale in Gracemere was a great place to buy new bulls for his commercial operation.

Running over two properties (Bloomsbury and Theodore), with about 5700ha of cattle country, Mr Jeppesen said he was hoping to make it to the Charters Towers sale next week, providing he did not get rained in. 

“Mostly when we go up there we buy between seven and nine bulls,” he said. 

“We don’t buy as many bulls as we used to because we’ve been crossbreeding, but lately we have been buying Santa Gertrudis, black polls, and some Limousin.”

Mr Jeppesen said with more than 800 breeders running in four mobs, about 90 per cent of the cows are female, with some Santa Gertrudis-crossed number five heifers as well. 

He said a focus for him when purchasing cattle was their poll status. 

“What I like about the northern bull sale is they’ve got a far better tradition of polls,” he said.

“You can source bulls with 12 or 14 generations of poll breeding in them and there’s nowhere else you will get that selections of bulls that are fair dinkum polls.”

The Jeppesen family sell at store sales and to the live export market, and Mr Jeppesen said at the moment the price is right.

He said last week he sold bigger weaners between 400kg and 500kg to a feedlot for $3.20/kg.

Mr Jeppesen said when he was young his parents had a short coated brown Hereford stud, and said convincing his dad to go into Brahmans was a tough job. 

“We finally bought a couple of Brahman bulls and I had to spend a long time trying to persuade my parents that we should go from a polled Hereford to a Brahman, so we were fairly late into the Brahmans but dad was quite impressed with them,” he said.