(image and excerpt from The Land, 21 January 2021)
The first crop of graduates from The Invitational Red Angus Bull Sale feed efficiency trial were given glowing reviews from vendors and assessors after completing 70 days at the UNE Smart Farm Tullimba Feedlot outside of Armidale.
Interest within the industry was high to see if a catalogue of bulls from vendors in NSW and South East Queensland could be prepared under the same pre-sale conditions and compared on structural and scanning data.
The 45 bulls were delivered to the feedlot in September aged from eight to 14 months, run together in an orientation period for 14 days, before beginning a preliminary feed and then progressing to a 70 day ration.
From there independent assessors selected the best 35 to be auctioned in Tamworth on April 30.
Vendors had their first glimpse of the sale entries during an open day on Thursday where the structural integrity of the group was praised, especially after enduring a waterlogged December on feed.
Having completed the trial on Wednesday, Roger Evans of Bovine Scanning Services at Tamworth scanned all of the bulls on Saturday along with completing a structural assessment.
He then assisted fellow assessors Roger Hann and Ross Anderson in selecting the top draft.
Mr Evans said overall the bulls were very uniform and would fit into the marketplace offering a good combination of growth for age, yield, softness and varying degrees of intramuscular fat.
“It was very interesting because there is different ages and there is cattle that have compensatory gain but the pleasing thing is after 70 days on feed it’s easy to identify cattle that are going to suit different marketplaces,” he said.
“There is cattle with some yield and a little bit less fat, there is also cattle with a bit more fat, maintain muscle and then different degrees of IMF so there are cattle that are going to suit a lot of different production systems.”
On average the group put on 123.8 kilograms for an average daily weight gain of 1.7kg having consumed an average of 15.52kg each day.
The average feed conversion rate (kilogram of growth/kilogram of feed) was 0.11.
Meanwhile, Yallambee Q56 and RA Q09 had the biggest IMF scores of 7.5 per cent while 13-month-old AK R2 had the largest growth rate from start to finish of 1.84kg/day. The feed trial top gainer was RA Q09 with a gain of 2.55kg/day.