Speckle Parks - are these Australian cattle more than just a pretty face? | Landline | ABC Australia

First impressions count. Even when your lot in life is beef production, it certainly doesn't hurt to be easy on the eye. Oh, look, I won't lie, and I know we're not meant to say it, but they're very attractive. They are. But beyond appearances and more importantly, these beasts have a lot to offer producers. We've run so many different breeds over the years, and on every front, they just outdo all the other breeds. Dale and Stacey Jones run Ivory Downs Speckle Park, a cattle stud that sprawls across 1600 hectares in the picturesque Brisbane Valley. Right now, they're running a mix of commercial cattle while also slowly building their herd of purebred Speckle Park beasts. Known for their unique speckled hides, the attractive breed appealed to Stacey right off the bat. But for Dale, to begin with anyway, their outward appearance wasn't much of a selling point. Stacey won them. I didn't want a bar of them. We bought 40 PDIC Brangus cows to Speckle Park Wills. Carved them, weaned them with all our others, probably 400 other calves, 500 calves. And the speckles just left everything 30 kilos heavier the whole way through feeding. So we sort of thought we were onto a good thing. Stuck with them. Stacey says she didn't need to do any further convincing. From that very first run, the speckles have sold themselves. Season on season, we've seen that and we haven't run a bull other than a speckle park since. The distinctive breed originated in Canada and was first brought to Australia in 2007. Aside from their aesthetic appeal, they're well known for having an affable temperament and are marketed as being hardy and able to handle harsh conditions of all extremes. But taking the breed from a hobby to a household name has proved difficult. Being a young breed, there's not a lot of data being put together on the breed plan figures and things like that. You know, we've been pushing like heck for people to get as much data as they can. Because, you know, real cattlemen aren't going to buy cattle without figures in this day and age. This lack of data first lamented by speckle park enthusiasts on landline nearly a decade ago continues to plague producers. It's hard sometimes in a smaller breed to get that data and get enough scalable data to really meet what the supply chain's looking for. But data from a carcass point of view and to be able to promote your product and where it fits in the market is extremely important. Twice yearly now, the Joneses host a multi vendor sale on their property to give speckle park breeders a Queensland option to sell their animals and to give the cream of the crop some exposure. It is a regretful sale, but we've got to sell a good one. So we thought we'd put a good one up. And why do you say that? Why is she one of your favourites? She's one of our favourites, just the temperament and just the style of her. She's just what we're trying to breed. So she just ticks all our boxes. So we're hoping she ticks everyone else's boxes. Their easygoing nature makes them easier to handle, for sure. But for Dale and Stacey, they're not just easy to handle. They require less handling. And that's really important. They're doing so well. You know, they just don't they don't need the extra top up out the back. And because they hold their condition better, it means they're going back in calf quicker, more easily. Stacey Jones is the current chairman of Speckle Park International. An industry group set up to support and promote Speckle Park cattle. After a series of stellar years for the world's fastest growing breed, things have steadied. Stacey says in some ways, Speckle Park has been a victim of its own success. The breed was doing exceptionally well. And in 2020, 2021, prices were stud prices were enormous. And so we were getting probably a reduction in quality control. To cut an animal early, that might make you ten thousand dollars. That's a tough call. And financially, I understand why people would have struggled with that decision. But it has meant that perhaps some animals that shouldn't have made their way into the stud side of it have. What do you think, sir? I'll be thirty thousand, two and a half. When it comes to the buying and selling of stud cattle, you want to be sure you're getting good value for money because some pretty serious cash gets thrown around. Stacey and Dale shelled out a whopping one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for this bull, Shady, who currently holds the world record for the top price paid for a bull of this particular breed. Interestingly, it was his lack of speckles that was a big part of Shady's appeal. We have a lot of commercial breeders who want to give the breed a try, but weren't necessarily willing to change the colour of the herd. People try the black bull. They're impressed with the quality of the calves. Then they're willing to try the other colours because they don't care what the rest of the herd looks like when they calve down. It's not just his colour that's appealing either. He's massive, tipping the scales at more than a ton. And he's a gentle giant. When he was away being collected, they told us that they couldn't get him up in the crush anymore. So they were actually collecting him out in the paddock. That's how quiet he is. The Joneses are doing things a little differently when it comes to Shady, as opposed to some of the other stud bulls on their place. We've sold their semen for what we think is value based on breeding and other things, whereas Shady we priced a lot cheaper. So we put him at $150 a straw compared to some of our other bulls that were up to $1,000, knowing that that would make it more accessible. Selling Shady's semen straws for a more affordable price may seem counterintuitive when it comes to your bottom line. But Stacey Jones is firm in her belief it's ultimately for the betterment of the breed. The whole point with him was to get a bigger uptake. So the more accessible we can make it, the wider he goes and the more exposure the breed gets. When you're looking at an animal, what are you looking for that's giving you a clue that it's a good beast? For us, number one is structure. You know, as we spoke about before, it's pretty rough out the back. So if we find the animal with the best genetics, if it structurally can't go out the back and do the job, it's not passing those genetics on. The estimated breeding values or EBVs are available across all breeds, and they give producers an indication of an animal's genetic merits for specific traits. But Stacey Jones believes there's a bigger picture worth considering when it comes to weighing up the value of speckles. One that we think is really important for the speckled park is their feed efficiency, because one of the biggest cost, running cost for us is feed. It depends if you're feeding grain or what you're feeding, but grain, you know, we sort of work at $380, $400 a tonne. You know, and when you feed three, four hundred at a time, it adds up pretty quick. Dale and Stacey are confident they can prove speckled park cattle have an increasingly important role to play in sustainable beef production. To do so, though, they need more data. So they're putting their money where their mouth is, and they're about to install a feed efficiency trial on their property. The feed efficiency trials will provide a breakdown of what it costs to produce a speckled park beast, basically to give some data behind what those in the industry have been seeing and saying. It's hoped that by building up the science behind the breed, that will also encourage a broader uptake, particularly for the people who are entrenched with another breed to get people to change from what they've always done and what they've always known. They've got to be given a good reason to do it. The trial will test 80 head at a time over a period of 49 days. And not just speckled park beasts either. They want to compare breeds and crosses. We often have people who say, oh, you know, I've got droughties. What is a speckled park look like crossed over a droughtie? So we want to be able to say not only this is what it looks like and here's its weight, but here's the efficiency results. So they've been out buying high quality animals across various breeds to build a solid testing herd. We plan on putting purebred of various breeds in testing them and then showing here's their conversion rate of feed. But put a speckled bull over them and here's the conversion rate. Of course, their hope is that the data will back up their belief that speckled park is the way to go. But even if the science shows something different, that's a win, too, because what they're really investing in isn't actually tied to any one specific breed, but rather a big picture approach to improving beef production on the whole. We should be trying to utilise the best of whatever we can to produce the best product, and whether that's one breed or a combination of breeds, we should be 100% about the quality.