Speckle Park triplets could attend Beef 2024 with their mother, Gayle

Travis said he would really like to take the triplets and their mother to Beef Week next year.

"That would be an ultimate goal, that would be quite an achievement," he said.

The triplets - Usher, Usman and Ursula - were born on August 20 to four-year-old Speckle Park cow, Gayle, after AI with semen from stud bull, WGSN142 Wally, of Wattle Grove Speckle Park Stud, Oberon, NSW.

Now nearly eight weeks old, Travis said it was pretty incredible all three had survived and were thriving.

"They're doing really well. They all want to be a calf, they're definitely not shy and they've got a fair bit of life about them," he said.

"We're trying to keep the expectations realistic, but also have a sneaky little think about what we can do with them in the future."

Travis said all three calves would be DNA tested to see if they were fertile and he had his fingers crossed for a positive result.

"With twins - a male and female twin - nine times out of 10, the female is often sterile, but when the triplets were born, they were born an hour apart and they were all in three separate different (embryo) sacs...we've never had twins before so we don't know how to interpret that for triplets," he said.

"Usher will probably go through as a bull. That's been the main goal to take the first born through and, hopefully, if everything's alright he will go on to be a stud progeny," he said.

"With the other two, they're just bonuses. The fact they're still alive and thriving... that's about as much as we expect from them so they've basically got a free ticket."

The only hiccup along the way for any of the triplets has been a bone infection with Usman which necessitated him being taken to the vet in Sarina for an x-ray and a seven-day course of antibiotics.

Travis said apart from that all three calves had been doing really well and putting on weight.

"They like their calf crumble, they like their chaff, they nibble on the grass, they drink plenty of water and they love to play in the hay so they're loving life," he said.

"Gayle has also been doing really well and they've finally figured out a feeding process.

"With three calves, you sometimes get one on the off side and the near side and one through the back, but the problem with the one through the back is they're always s**t on so there's constantly been a calf here with manure for a helmet.

"But they're starting to work it out where they've now got a bit of a system where they all get on one side and then come around and share the other side.

"But they won't carry to another cow for a milk bar or anything like that - they only know Mum and that's all they want to know."

Full of praise for Gayle, Travis said she was "a ripper cow".

"She's done everything just so well. She's known she's had three calves right off the bat and she wants to feed them," he said.

"She knows when one goes missing like when we took the calf down to the vet the other day, she was here for about four or five hours just bellowing out looking for him so she knew a calf had disappeared.

"I think there's just a really good maternal cow line through her heritage...she's a milk producing masterclass and we're really happy how she's been dealing with it all."

To keep her condition up, Travis has been giving Gayle a high-performance feed of high protein pellets, some chaff for a bit of small cut fibre and molasses for energy.

"We also introduced the calves as soon as possible to some calf crumble. We haven't actually been supplementary feeding them milk to try and get them through, it's all been Gayle and a little bit of calf crumble.

"They copy what Mum does very closely. If Mum's eating hay, they're eating hay. If she's eating pellets, they're all in the same trough trying to eat pellets as well.

"It's quite entertaining at feed time in the afternoon when I duck down and give them some chaff and pellets."

Blair Plains is a commercial beef operation of 1500 acres (607 ha) on the Sarina Range.

Travis said he had been using Speckle Park bulls to put hybrid vigour influences into Brangus, Brahman and Droughtmaster cows.

"We keep a lot of weight data because we've been transitioning country from depleted pastures into high performance pastures," he said.

"So we keep a lot of data and feedback on whether cows are actually performing on new pastures which has been good because we've been analysing how much an influence the Speckle Park sires have been making on that first cross, that F1 calf, and it's been working really well for us."

Travis said there were about 200 breeders on the property at the moment, but they had been running a weaner operation where they were looking to turn off steers at six months old at 200 to 220 kg.

"Generally, we'd retain our female cattle, but in the last few years we've noticed a lot of demand for Speckle influence heifers so we've been selling a lot of progeny," he said.

"And we're just getting to the stage where because we're not a self replacing herd per se anymore, it's given us the option of what do we bring in to put over that F1 heifer.

"Do we go a different sire like a Brangus sire or something like that and have the Speckles as a terminal sire or do we go with a Speckle again and do an F2 , a second generation cross, or do we just sell the progeny and capitalise on market demand which has been working well at the moment."

Travis explained that another reason they had been selling more cattle than usual was because grass seed was expensive and they had been buying a lot of it to continue to improve their country.