BREEDING Brahman’s in the Wet Tropics areas of Ingham and Kennedy has provided its own unique challenges for third generation farmer Peter Chiesa.
Peter, together with wife Mariah, run about 220 breeders plus progeny across their leased properties on the tropical North Queensland coast.
They have leased about 400 hectares across the region and are slowly building up their business, Palm Creek Brahmans.
Peter comes from a long line of farmers, with his grandfather first establishing a cane farm in the region. His father and uncles also work on the land and the family provides beef to their family owned butcher Chiesa and Sons Butchery, in Ingham where you can find Uncle Mario’s famous sausages.
For Peter, his interest in the cattle industry came early. He bought his first stud cows at the tender age of 13 in 2003 and established Palm Creek Brahmans a year later in 2004.
He and Mariah run both red and grey Brahmans and and are working hard to refine their bull breeding herd.
“Our focus for our herd is breeding beef and lots of it,” Peter said.
“We also put a heavy focus on performance and the functionality of our females.
“Bull breeding is the objective, though we are heavy with the knife at this stage, we only produced 40-50 bulls for this years market, with 60-70 next year as our females from our better cow lines start to preform across the herd”
“We are focusing on quality.”
“I learned how to AI when I was about 16, that’s always been a key tool to improve the herd cost effectively. We expose all our females to at least one if not two Fixed Timed AI (FTAI) per breeding season
“Now we’re in our second year of IVF, we are using our top cows, cows that have proven themselves to me over the last 10 years, with consistent calving and always producing good quality cattle. These cows are getting to be old now though are the most productive, fertile cows we’ve got on the place, so now we’re trying to multiply them and their daughters with industry leading bulls.”
Palm Creek has been reinvesting in their future and last year purchased Carinya Beechwood, a grey NCC Sugarwood son for $27,000 in partnership with Callan Solari of XMS Brahmans.
They also invested with the North Queensland Cattle Consortium a share in the $45,000 heifer, NCC Dienka 3652.
“She’s not only the best red cow in the country, she’s out of the most influential red cow family in Australia. Her first IVF calves are due in the next few months, and we are looking forward to seeing them on the ground with the prospect of polled sons and daughters.” Peter said.
“We are looking at functionality and balanced cattle, so good beefy types, with good udders and good fertility to back it up, because that’s the only way for us to maintain profitability.
Peter said he is breeding bulls on the coast to go anywhere, with buyers coming from Mt Garnet, Innisfail, Tully, the Burdekin and Charters Towers regions.
They attended their first bull sale, Gold City at Charters Towers last year, topping the herd bull section at $9,000, and will attend this years Gold City Sale, on November 2 with another 10 bulls.
But breeding in the Wet Tropics brings its own unique challenges, and Peter and Mariah have had to learn how to run their business taking into account the often drawn out wet season.
“The start of the year saw two flood events occur. With that comes the challenge of wet weather feeding, where we have a low dry matter component in our grass making the rate of passage very quick. The cattle then have a lot harder time extracting nutrition from their feed,” Mariah said.
Peter said they also had to be mindful as to when to breed.
“We make sure we have all our calves on the ground before Christmas, any later and the wet season hits with a greater risk for a range of infections and rain scald, the huge increase in humidity over that period can also lead to the calves overheating.”
