Kay Becker is speaking with Alf Collins from CBV Brahmans at Marlborough.

Alf speaks of how he manages his Brahman herd and the resources he has used and the people he speaks with that have influenced his decisions about the path he has taken.

Video transcript

Kay is with Alf Collins from CBV Brahman and Marlborough this interview is brought to you by the
Australian Brahman Breeders Association in recognition of the 75th year since the formation of the association on the 7th of October 1946.

The association and the breed continue to thrive and grow and many of those stories past and present should be recorded for future generations to enjoy.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, I'm interviewing Alf Collins and anyone who's had anything to do with the beef industry beef marketing beef genetics or indeed the Brahman industry will have come across Alf and his name will be no stranger. He has probably spent more hours in time than anyone else in the industry, studying genetics and what makes animals work, and how they work than the average person.

So, Alf, it's great to have you, thanks for coming in and we look forward to hearing all about your exploits in this that is not regarded by a lot of people as the standard procedures for doing things and I know that you like to be a leader in doing things differently and that's been your way always

Let's go right back like I said the Collins name is certainly not new to the beef industry or indeed the Brahman breed but your slant and your way of doing things and breeding cattle is probably a little bit different to what the way you grew up doing it.

When did you decide that you needed to get smarter and work smarter rather than harder?

We can always be really if we look back diligently I thought I had the most amazing father who gave me open reign from an extremely early age to do what had to get done and he took the view back in the 50s early-mid early to mid-50s. I Remember when he spayed every Hereford he owned in 1953. Mick Boyd spade and he was so glad to be rid of him we were going into zebra cattle but he took the attitude that cattle to be effective had to demonstrate it and that made him very different and it gave me a wonderful slant on life. Then of course I used to go through Mr Beak's paddocks at Marlborough, wag school a lot to go and open gates on the mail run because Mr Landsberg the mailman, you know, had 47 gates or something to open for the day and he was short and round and a gate happened good so he didn't care how many days I took off school and nor did my father.

I had this wonderful childhood where I always thank God for his blessings and one of them was this father that gave me absolute open reign and gave me jobs far bigger than I could ever handle. So I'd fail early on and learn a bit of humility hopefully but gave me a wonderful grounding in thinking outside the box at that point. There are lots of inspirational people like Mr Landlords at Cherokee was way ahead of his time and he was so benevolent to me when I was a kid I think the world of that old man. Tom Lasseter in the United States I used to read every advertisement that he had my father used to get American Cattlemen magazines from a friend in the u.s and Tom Lasseter said the same thing show me what you can do cow doesn't look pretty and style yourself up just show me and he demanded a calf every year from every cow he owned now Mr Lasseter or Mr Landless or my father or myself would be the first to say not every cow will do it we just want to find the ones that can.

So that was an interesting or fascinating start in life, unfortunately, I lost my dad when I was 22 and that really put some responsibility in the camp and we had to really redouble our efforts which we did and I had a lot of younger brothers and sisters.

I set about to triple the land the cattle numbers very quickly, that did blow up actually and what you said before about you can be the odd man out too often and I was, so it was easy to just you know,
shunt me out of the picture and keep on doing business as usual and that happened.

I had this wonderful background in coal mining where you could talk to some of the best geologists and the best analysts in the coal game who really knew their numbers. All that was a wonderful grounding that if you interrogate data you will discover something, might not be what you wanted to discover, but you will discover, so I've always kept data.

Kay: You know that's in itself in the agricultural industry talking when you were talking that happening data as it was a foreign word to 95 of agriculture back then Alf: "probably 99".

Kay: You know everyone just went about doing what dad did and kept on doing it that way and like you said some failed some succeeded um you and your thirst for that data obviously was very strong and you know you said you went your own way from the rest of the family so did you make a solid decision from that day on that you were going to capture this data and make it work because it was your number one passion you know like you said you didn't need the prettiest cows or the best bull you needed ones that worked for you so who did you know where did you turn then to get that data or did you just decide I can do this by a selection process myself?

There was a need to do it and whereas the beef industry didn't except for Mr Lassiter and Mr Delanders was measuring feed conversion in 1960, and he built 40 something stalls just to measure net feeder for what a classical man.

I'm always honoring my father I suppose I'm thanking God but these wonderful people are in our way and compounded with that I wag school often to go to Belmont Research station, Father would take me to a cattlemen's conference with cattlemen from all over the state and indeed Australia.

I met Dr Butterfield when I was about 12 years old from the university of Sydney wow he dissected all breeds of cattle into muscle fat and bone and connective tissue than what a glorious soul because he actually I approached him and right at the end of the meeting and I said could I have a word with you I said yes don't go away I've got to do a couple of things here and i'll come to see you and I sat down over there in the store and waited and this eminent Professor come sat down beside me and told me everything he knew yeah so it was a I think we're very fortunate where we land in life and you know Ken Coombe who only passed away last year.

Ken was our neighbor when I was probably 14 or 15 and ken was measuring cattle and other people thought you're a lunatic he'd sit on his veranda and encourage me to think about management and nutrition and genetics and so he told me when he was a very old man what great joy he got out of those conversation because he was this kid that wanted to jump all these hurdles yeah and bless Ken's heart he he took a lot of time like his Sunday afternoon.

Any time he was going to get with Jan and the children that's right and he had me sitting there encouraging so you know clearly you have had a a fascination and a want to learn to do things differently to the way the normal person did it back then you know we're talking probably mid-60s and like you said ken was pretty unique back then because he captured data very so you progressed and you know married and had your own family and ran a family a very solid family business did so capturing the data did that become a family affair for you and
and you know everything was a measured thing.

How did you go about measuring that you know it's I hear your story about the Professor and he's got a you know a lab and all of the things to go about was it just basic I guess basic practices that you you improved that you measured you know you know more about your animals than than most people know about their animals.

I'll give you a question it's just it's you just genuinely believe that that is the best way to do business I believe it is the best way it's the only way we can keep faith with our commercial cattle clients and one of those other early grounding things was whereas beef cattlemen generally didn't do it and we just spoke about the handful that did yeah and they're inspirational.

Dairy people measured everything and so did pig people so I used to hang out with dairy people and pig people whenever I could find them and I'd read their bulletins and then I was given bulletins from the University of Florida Texas a m when I was a child I had an uncle that had no sons but he adopted me real quick he gave me bulletins from the 30s from CSIRO's early research and so I can't take credit for all this stuff I was able to pull it together and initially we had analyzed what mattered to a commercial herd and it became very apparent that it was low cost of production and high reproduction and one of the other real heroes in there.

I sat and had endless conversations, discussions debates was tom rudder in the dpi now tom rudder he was never in his office he was always in someone's paddock analyzing one of the guys he worked closely with was Hank Maynard yes you know they would Allen Wright, out was doing when rubber bands drove computers alan wrightout was doing spreadsheets on his whole cattle herd at mount cromberg at Belah Valley so if you hang out just you hang out with those kind of people some of it rubs off and I was hungry for the knowledge and there's another bloke I went looking for in england when I was 18.

I left Australia when I was 18 looking for and I had an agenda they were measuring net feed efficiency in scotland I wanted to see it so I went there and we couldn't afford to do what they were doing on the research station but the most efficient dairy herd in the whole of the uk was owned by Harry Morrell and I went to the metropolitan milk board to find this out so I hitched up the m1 up to Yorkshire and knocked on his door well he treated me with open arms treated me like his best son oh wow what a man yeah he measured everything yeah so do you put a lot of your success over the years down to Brahman cattle or do you put it down to beef cattle in general or do you put it down to your willingness to to do things probably not what is regarded as mainstream and let's be real you're very successful now you've got you know lots of land you've raised a very successful family who have all taken on some ninety percent I think all have taken on some role in the in the rural industry at some stage so do you sheet that back to you to your father spaying his hereford cows and buying and bringing in zebu or do you think that it yours your your thirst for knowledge and your thirst to make things work are on a par with Brahman cattle I'm certain that Brahma cattle have been the common denominator in everything we've done now I'm saying that from a position of strength because for 35 years I tried to develop an adapted composite and what I've noticed is there are plenty of claims about cattle but very few are adapted enough to handle the difficult times we're going to strike.

If you drive through the Mulberry district now there's no grass to be seen no and my place is worse than that because I've got bad manners when it comes to stocking rates at times but it's been a wonderful way to stress cattle without killing them and finding the ones that work and so if you decide the reproduction which is 70 of all the margin made out of cattle and the reproduction at a specific time if you can determine that which tom I don't know all those clever people helped me dr fresh Dr Virgo Professor Dochio what brilliant minds and I was able to just hang out with those guys and they were always introducing us new ideas and new people but management is the override I don't matter I don't care what breed you may choose in my mind the only two breeds that have succeeded for adaptation have been Brahma cattle and the borane cattle out of Africa out of Kenya and I've used both.

I've used four African breeds in the search for adaptive species and the search for reproduction they the other breeds weren't tough enough they just fell out of our system but the zebu or the zebra wine the hump species stay generally speaking and I'd like to include we did some head-to-head comparisons in brazil we were breeding between eight and twelve thousand carbs a year in brazil with cbb semen out of a full blood and a lorry herd and it ended up a big herd we built it on the basis of reproduction up to 55 000 cows actually wow and then the whole lot went under sugar cane in two years.

Oh no, 55 000 cows they just poof gone yeah one bloke come and got six thousand heifers and took him home but the comparison with the nalora cattle which I admire greatly because they're highly adapted but they're lean and they're fast and the reproduction was sub optimal and we changed that and the subsequent second and third cross cattle that we were involved with were awesome and I pay a lot of respect to the adapted capacity of the bushnell or not the show nellorie and when I'm speaking bahamut cattle you know I'm not talking show cattle no there's show cattle and there are Brahma bush cattle we relate to the Brahma bush cattle which is northern Australia and central there have been people come and go out of zebra cattle but every time you have a serious conversation with cattlemen they'll say we need to get our zubu or our Brahma advantage back yes we went into a flatter back or we went into a hairier thing or a whiter thing or a blacker thing or a redder thing and it failed because our cost of production just shot through the roof so Brahma cattle to me the pointy end of them have been awesome and one it's because of their ability to be adapted but the other thing is that without management.

I just mentioned that before management is first so you've got to be really bloody-minded about management intensity and in our case we made October 1st every year doesn't matter whether like we're going to be mating in what two weeks time no grass no nothing on the horizon but we're going to mate because there'll be a percentage of those cattle will conceive and maintain the pregnancy regardless of what's happening and we have hunted for them and now we're in our fifth decade of hunting for them so walk us through that procedure you know a lot lots of people call you know after first you know lots of people I don't join first year heifers and then you know then in their second year they get one one go and if they don't if they don't produce a calf they're cold and off they go I'm guessing your your aim is that you don't have to have any cold heifers that they're all going to produce a calf either at their first or second year joining depending on what your
management well we'll invite them to have a go.

We've had some abysmally low rates like I truck cat all the way to mckinley out towards concurry for two years and I got a 30 odd percent pregnant heifers and a 46 percent yeah and they were licking up gidgy burr and and turning over rocks but at least we had somewhere to park them yes and thanks to sid batt and his wife leonie they were so kind to us yeah and jimmy brody next door oh they were wonderful people to be around but out of that that 30 odd percent and the 46 percent they were stars they were truly worth and you asked what we measure well leading up to those matings both years I palpated their ovaries for development I scored their uterus for development and size I gave them a condition score and a kilogram score trying to see what made a difference after all of that the the pregnancies were independent of weight and age but they were very specific to size there were two bulls that stood out that was double the average that year in their daughter's pregnancies so you asked what remedy.

I ripped straight home and I kept 12 sons of both those bulls out of cows that had eight or ten calves perfect interval and that was a successful operation we did a lot like during that period we were measuring testicle diameters too but not to see how big they got but how early they went from soprano to baritone and that's very well that's very definable yep and so we tore into that crikey we've been well
over 30 years doing that yep I've got to mention a fella in in income from Missouri a fellow called Professor Jim Kinder who I met in 1990 with Dr Dochio a reproduction physiologist both of them and kinder that what do you call it the symbol for the state of Missouri is a mule, stubborn as a mule that's the first thing and he can be and the other state statement shows me, yes and I've adopted that over many years and I'm proud to say and I was telling Jim Kinder the other day because I talked to him often yes and he's an inspirational man and I said Jim I've had to adopt the Missouri stance.

This show me business because I can't think of any other way to describe what cattle got to do just show me what you can do yes don't look don't roll your eye don't have bloody eyelashes or step around pretty mm-hmm show me what you could do and the remarkable thing is that the cattle still end up looking just like cattle that's it that's right not a lot difference really is there that's not so you know we going to wind the clock back to the 30 years with the you know your nucleus heard of you know a 30 chuck carving and a 46 car in two years that 30 and 46 percent those those cows came home and were obviously the start of that of that process forward did it continue not you know was was that a was that a genetic trait that those cows then continued to throw into their you know those that had hair for scarves did that did that process continue isn't it funny you know we're looking with the benefit of 30 years hindsight now we had done the same pressure matings on heifers every single year at the same time but that year there was just simply no grass well it was there were little bits of grass yeah and we just threw gates over all over Korea out of Mckinley and but when you looked at the scenery it was red dirt and gidgey rocks but they were looking up gidgyber and so they survived. Now it appears that uterine survival is driven by some fascinating biological velcro to put it in our terms spermatology has been done to death for 80 years and very little has changed extremely small changes in reproduction in rural terms yep but if you look at a chart on uterine survival virtually all joinings result in a conception well over 95 95 to 98 of all joinings of roughly healthy cows and roughly healthy bulls that's not a problem it could be if you were neglectful of a few other factors but it's not a problem but uterine survival between day 7 and day 21 you'll lose 45 to 65 percent of those concepts that's a huge number.

That's a big big loss and I think that we had no idea what was driving the higher reproduction has it become because you asked me did the heifers that came through really jumped through the hoops did they have successful progeny and sons and daughters the answer was yes to that that that was a bell ringer it made us even more hungry for more knowledge and more data what can we collect and analyze that might help us get there so we put the herd into speed bands which meant that if you carved off the first three-week mating and you were tagged on August 14. yes you were a golden girl and you went straight to c1 or the alpha group and become a mating group and we mated bulls in there that had a similar record of their daughters and their mothers so we were sort of stacking the deck there pretty heavily and if you didn't get pregnant in the first sight of a bull but the second three-week mating and we had all these sire groups mated in controls then you become it got into the bravo group and you also got access to some pretty wonderful bulls for the track record.

I guess I keep coming back to track record all this this show me stuff yep go show me and if you show me that you're competent i'll put you in my best house and there was a really funny thing happened on the on the way through that I suppose we imported 24 bulls out of north america all glorious looking things from fantastic people but they almost all failed at our cost of production and I suppose that reinforces what I was saying before if you manage tightly with a low cost of production you're going to discover some amazing genes and you're also going to cut the throat of a lot of cattle that you thought were going to be good yes and may have cost you a lot of money in that case it cost me dearly because I borrowed every damn cent to get them here [Laughter] and I and my wife said to me at the time you needed to buy this many I said well how how else will you find out in a hurry yeah you've got to have a broad range of bulls no good getting one saying isn't it glorious and promote him to hell and say this is the best bull in the world because he's not he's a bull and so he always took that view so over the 24 bulls two and a half of them delivered something useful and they did
and it was interesting that when you delved in behind them they had management comes up every time it trumps genetics every time.

Management and genetics is an unbeatable combination for in my terms and don't blink I guess yeah because you know we were talking before we're very open about our failures it's the only way we can get a stepping stone to get to the next point that's right and those 30 and 40 percents and 50 pregnancies that we've had it's not just once we have had them on different occasions and we never blame the weather we never blame ourselves or I can kick my backside for being a stupid overstocker at times but I always pay it back to the environment later I always develop the country again but there's always some animals that want to say yes we will do the job and I can give an example of that about two years ago we're having a little bull sale on the property and the night before rick whittle who puts all our data in and he's a retired veterinarian I said to him Rick we've got a fair few bulls by 84.87 that's the white poly bull there's a lot of bulls in this catalog he said oh yeah you've got over 100 carbs by that bull I said no we've never got a hundred cars for anybody he's only made it for nine weeks yes so Rick being Rick went straight to the computer when clackety clack and came up with and he doesn't make a lot of jokes right he just looked and he said try 171 carves weaned then figure out how many were actually conceived yes and you rarely saw that bull work I loaned him to a friend of mine later who said he never saw him work yes alongside another bullet he saw working all the time they got equal calves yeah so there's something in I think.

The biological velcros uterine survival uterine attachment and if we can do all that at a low cost of production then these kinds of zebra cattle or Brahman cattle as we know them are our kind of cattle yeah and they are revolving this constant evolution like a day after tomorrow we'll go through probably 220 bulls to pick 120 to mate in various herds collaborator hurts daughter herds my own herds yep and we'll be trying to get in mind around all those little bits of data and so do you along with with the family did you develop a like a program that you now feed all that data into and then you know tonight tomorrow before you go through those when you go to those bulls do you you know have a program that spits you out a bit of paper that goes okay Alf this is bull a and this is his this is what we know about him is that what you make your decision on that he gets to go to the yes to fun or he goes and has his head cut off tomorrow yeah well I I'm never so hasty to cut the heads off anymore because I made some monumental mistakes at times I thought he was useless and turned out his daughter's a bulletproof yeah you'll do that sometimes if you've got a bad temperable and we'd get odd ones the parents are gentle but the bull's not sociable and you think oh bug I'm not going to continue to use that bull no but you find his daughters are awesome for reproduction and I try not to be snappy about my decisions now when he can sit in a paddock cost me a hundred dollars a year to keep him there.

One of the things that helped us a lot I better answer your question first we will have printouts on all 220 bulls for days to carving puberty threshold live x dollar index dollar index they're the things that matter also the carving interval for four generations of their mothers grandmothers great grandmothers etc we'll have the data with us right there yep in separate folders and we'll look at it because we can't remember all the stuff we need to oh gosh no and any old bulls are leather-bound books you can't see right in them no but the things that drive them the data helps us find it that's the exciting bit yeah so you know it's for a man who's he'd grown up you know well didn't he didn't spend a lot of time I guess but you know right up until you until your dad died and then when you took over it that that part of you was very much you know an appeal thing so now when Alf Collins goes through his 220 bulls if it's the it's got the best figures you know if all if it's the best of everything that's on that piece of paper but he's an atrocious looking animal there once I cut this the skin off that he wants you know if that bull goes ahead and breeds some bullocks for me and when I send them the meat works and they cut the skin off it we're not going to know that it had a crooked nose or it you know had a bit of a sway back or it had a straight leg or all the things that lots of other people cull their bulls for do you take any of that into consideration.

Or do you go I'm working for this beast on I'm selecting and keeping this bull because of this information that I've got okay I love quiet cattle that's the first thing I've had some that weren't I bought something I bought some that turned out evil they didn't weren't evil when I bought them this is a long time back I'm talking 40 years ago now I don't want to go there again no but the remarkable thing is if you select for function the cattle turn out pretty much like cattle we like them to be fleshy we like to be very athletic at the end of every bull sale now our little annual bull sale we'll let out 80 bulls out of the first wire cooler and they run back through the stock yard and out and people can't wait to wrap the sail up so they can come watch the bulls run through yeah [Laughter] and they it's a really interesting and they they tear through that because they don't want to get belted by the bloke behind them yeah yeah and then they pull them out there and play and mess about and then we'll let another 103 out of the next wire of four and five-year-old followers yep and they just look I don't know I i try not to to differentiate a space if they're a little bit different and I don't know real wacko I think the cattle turn out pretty much like cattle.

Yeah yeah they've got all the traits that that people who who choose don't choose on genetics they choose on on confirmation I guess the confirmations there if the genetics are there is like is I guess the the point of the exercise I did have a couple of new clients come to our field day and stayed for the sale one bought some cattle yeah they didn't but he probably will and he said I can't believe that you don't feed these cattle something to make them look this good because they're muscley but you've bred a lot of cattle it's not hard to breed mostly cattle if you want mostly cattle you'll breed them you own your own management and you'll also if you demand they have a baby every year from the cows you retain they will those things will perpetuate and putting the hurt in speed bands back 25 26 years ago either one of my daughters just told me she was leaving school when she was about 15 and looked me in and said I'm going to do this and we've all been there we're going to be rebels I remember your youth and a few others of my good friends and long live the rebels and I said you reckon we could get this heard into speed bans this year first year you know you've got responsibilities now yep no worries and there was a start of putting them in speedbanks now there was no way to analyze reproduction speed at that time other than our own management groups so we devised an excel spreadsheet that gave us a starting point of c1 and a finishing point of c5.

It didn't matter where they landed we didn't care we just analyzed the ones that started in c1 and stayed there and they were very rare we analyzed the ones that started in c5 and come back to c1 but over a 10-year period we had an average c value we also had a number of where they varied from where they started plus or minus that was powerful because there was no genetic analysis for this trait and I used to talk to the people at ag with endlessly wanting their stuff and they said so do we so I gave them all my data they developed days to carving not just off mine it'd be foolish for me to say so but that that was their benchmark yep and that was the start of the very very special data we have today of days to carving dollar indexes for jackpots and dollar indexes for reproduction oh of for start again reproduction which is acer carving then you've got japox dollar index and live x dollar index now reproduction is better represented in the live x ones because that's a faster turnover of cattle at 420 kilos yes with 300 to 400 kilos whereas the japox one will show some benefit of some larger laser cattle but because reproduction drives the data drives are private.

It is the majority of the figure in the equation and I think it's got real legs so you know you you've always been ahead of your time what do you think is the next where do you think the next bit of information what do you think is the next bit of information I guess that that the beef industry in particular needs to to improve to go ahead you know to keep to keep pace with with the world I guess and the the changing way that people I have to do business the changing ways that the people like to live the changing socioeconomic areas that we live in you know we if we if you kept doing what you were doing 40 years ago you wouldn't know what you know now do you what do you think is the next next hurdle that we're going to need to jump I guess to be able to maintain the pace that that continues to drive our our industry as a business rather than just something we like to do yes it must be a business that's for sure the more we discover the more we discover we don't know that's right so if we thought we knew one or two things I can safely say now that there's a million things I don't know anything about but I'm anxious to find out some of them yep I'm never sure about it when people say you're ahead of your time because that means you can die ahead of your time too you know I don't think that'll happen I had a wonderful old friend in new south wales that's what his wife said when he went he was gone at 67.

and she said David was always ahead of his time I wish he didn't do this one yeah that's right when he'd like to fail but hell he kicked a lot of goals that fella in his short life too yeah you know on a serious note well they were serious we didn't want to lose him but I suppose cattle that can reproduce at a low cost of production will preserve what you spoke about our terms of trade the lifestyle that we would like to lead with a margin in it that we're not anxious and I guess I've tried you know I do I work hard to take the anxiety out of cattle I like to laugh at my life and I like to smile at my cattle and I like to build a smile and thank God for his goodness it allows us to go and do it yes but the terms of trade must be preserved costs are escalating all the time we've constantly got to produce in my time this is easy to if we focus on low cost of production high reproduction and rapid acceleration of growth which is very different from selecting great big chunks of things that you cannot keep your groceries up to that's right but there are ways of measuring production per hectare 100 mils of rain they're very effective and if we focus on that see we haven't even unraveled the biome of the gut which is double the biome of you and me or the trees or the grass and no one's bothered to look in it very few people have I won't say no one has because obviously people do but they're not fashionable research so they're shelved or they can't get funding the function of the liver has enormous replication through the entire endocrine system the function of the whole myriad of lipids or fats because they all you must have lipids to transport hormones to and from the pituitary and then endocrine system to to the ovaries and the testes and all the production systems they're subjects that aren't flavour of the month they don't get much recognition.

You asked me a good question there and it's worthy of a good answer because that is the that's meaning of success in my terms in the next little while let's unravel the things that matter not reinvent the wheel with just a different hubcap and I just get so tired of that kind of research I've I've viewed as a bit of humor I suppose but and that's why we're just going to do our own stuff yeah because you're waiting for the conventional people who control research funds like the mla I used to talk to them until I was blue in the face and it was like talking to a tree and one time one of their ceos he said to them oh you'll have to talk to dr and so-so about this he was waiting to get out of dodge he didn't want to be talking to me and I said it's like talking to a bloody tree I've already spoken to him that's why I'm talking to you and you don't want to talk to me about it and you go to hell you have no importance of the cattle industry whatsoever.

I'll go find someone that does want it hunt these facts down and that is when we engaged Professor Hayes and Professor Dokio Godard into a team to do private research and they were so willing and so generous with their time and their minds because each of those fellows are just world authorities and I spoke of prop kinder in the us from missouri another guy in brazil Barucelli but Pietro is an awesome researcher and he's given us a lot of wind in our sails by encouragement and supposition and let's look at this too my friends yes in fact when we finished it i'll show you some diagrams that he helped put together fascinating stuff I cut them around in my pocket all the time [Laughter] for a bit of like reading so you know I guess you know it is sometimes that you know frustrating that like you say it all the information you get is just like and that's a good analogy and you have hubcap put on it but do you think if we can can harness some of that knowledge that that you know that is going to keep us at the forefront I guess of of what it's going to take for us to be able to stay in business as cattlemen it is going to take that it is going to take that intensity of thought which it means and that puts the good end of Brahman cattle in an extraordinary position because my limited experience breeding cattle is that nothing has ever matched the tenacity of a good Brahma with the exception of the very best of the brand not the bahrain breed they're they're an absolute bell curve I ran a heard of bran as a zoo for 10 years and I kept all of all the failures and the winners to establish a bell curve on them because I live on bell curves.

The best end of those were quite extraordinary you know one of those original brand bulls had identical carcass traits to the angus controls at clay center in the united states no one talks about it but he had identical carcass traits a bull called b-22 I bought him out of the consortium because he was quiet and he was functional and I knew he had some good data I didn't care about the carcass stuff because you don't get paid for it no but you do get paid for kilograms per hectare 100 mils yes so what must we do find the cattle we can do that at a low cost and that's where this high level of adaptation is a must-have in my terms because I did mention I'd mated 13 different breeds that all claimed they were good and incidentally of those whole plethora of boss tourist cattle they were boss tourists mostly some sangers some african sangers three different strains of those the galloway there was red on rocks and bracken fern at the top of the Snowy River was the most successful of all the tauruses for the common reason we're just discussing they are adapted beyond all else in that environment to harsh conditions and the man that bred them put a lifetime into selecting cattle that would do that he was an inspiration to me a man called Haynesworth.

He was involved in alternative health and he was a leader in his field he's formed the ortho molecular society but Haynesworth and I were friends since I was 18. Yes, how fortunate are we to meet these wonderful people early in their lives gosh elf you certainly have meant your fair share of pretty dynamic people in your life and I guess your thirst for knowledge is probably what makes you go and seek those people out and it's it's certainly something that you know you are to be congratulated on because you don't just take what you're told lying down.

You need to be able to have that backed up with some proper data that's going to actually be to be able to be tested and you're happy to do the testing yourself you don't necessarily think that that is someone else's job and so you know I know that you could sit here and talk about this for hours and we'll probably get you back to have a second and go around of a chat because there is so much to the way you do things but we'd just like to thank you for coming in and I guess you know there's plenty of cattle producers out there who owe you a big debt for their successes so we're very honored to have people like you in the industry thanks for coming in thanks for making it happen

Kay: pleasure

Alf: okay pleasure okay