This is Seeds for Success, a show where we have a good yarn about Ag life with producers who are having a go. On the show, you'll hear from farmers in New South Wales who are out there battling the elements, making tough calls, and getting the job done. You'll get a laugh out of some of their stories and also pick up some know- how along the way. I'm your host Neroli Brennan. Today, we are chatting with Annie Scott. Annie runs her family's 2, 300 hectare property and angus
stud on Karoo between Bathurst and Lithgow. Annie took over management from her parents in 2008 and formed a partnership with her father in 2018. In this episode, Annie explains that their breeding focus is consistent, never- ending improvement with
extensive data collection to produce higher quality animals. Annie also shares that pasture management is their top priority, where grass is king, and their grass manager, Gareth, or GM for short, oversees diverse pasture mixes and uses paddock- specific soil testing
for targeted fertilization rather than broad applications. We also hear how shifting their calving later in the season to suit their high- altitude climate between 700 and 1100 meters where grass doesn't grow for months, and following a structured annual calendar for winter feed planning, weaning, pregnancy testing, and bull sales has
been one of their keys to success. Local Land Services Senior Ag Advisor, Lauren Costin, caught up with Annie at home on Karoo to bring you part one of their two- part chat.
Hey listeners, today I'm with Annie Scott at Karoo at Meadow Flat New South Wales. We're about halfway between Bathurst and Lithgow. And welcome to the Seeds for Success podcast, Annie.
Thank you.
Can you start off by giving us a little bit of an overview of your property here?
Firstly, thanks for having me. It's a great privilege that you want to showcase Karoo today. Just a bit about us, I guess. Karoo is a property of about 2, 300 hectares. That's just an approximate estimate. Now, enterprise mix, well, most people just think we have Angus cattle, but we divide that into two enterprises, the stud and the commercial herd. And we also have on the side a cropping enterprise, which is more the crops that we grow for grazing only.
With us, succession started later in my dad's life, and I've been the business manager of Karoo since 2008 and progressively moved on to a formal partnership that started in 2018, and that was between John and myself. This, I guess, enabled us to make more decisions in regard to the management of the farm's long- term projects and the breeding decisions in our stud herd then started to be made by myself in conjunction always with John, but I guess
I took a more managerial role. So I guess I was doing that, to an extent, beforehand, but I guess it's just made it all for more the partnership in 2018.
So John's your father?
John passed away late last year, so things are a bit different around Karoo now. So that was how the business structure was. So the partnership at the moment is still continuing along as normal. That business structure will change over time again to then we'll become directors of the company and so forth and move on from there. We have two permanent employees. We also have my husband, who has his own earth moving business, but he's also involved
in the daily operations of Karoo. Also, my sister is becoming an integral part of the business, especially when we have events on. She lives in Victoria, but she comes up fairly often and helps me when I have big events on or we're just busy. She's a great asset to have. She's really important to the Karoo business. And also one of my brothers is our maintenance manager and
does our mechanical repairs. We also have our son who works off- farm for a rural contractor, which we engage to do our fencing and yard work and when we have busy times. He does work on farm, but through the rural contractor. When we have other contractors that come in to fulfill in the gaps that are specialized in their field. For example, we have a vet consultant, Hannah, from Emerge Ag, who sets out all our animal health program for the year. We're situated, like you said, halfway
between Bathurst and Lithgow. Our altitude is about 1100 meters at the front of the farm, but does fall away quite significantly down to about 700 meters at the back of the farm. Our soil types are basalt to granite soils. Basalt up the front in the higher production country and granite soils down the back, which makes it really good to manage. Because then we have, in the different seasons, we can move the cattle around to where the pastures are best. And that leads us onto the pastures. We
have a huge emphasis on our grass. Our established pastures include phalaris, clovers, fescue, and cocksfoot, primarily. In our pastures that we do now, all those are included, but we also include chicory and ryegrass. Livestock, we have 300 stud cows and about 700 commercial cows, as well as running 120 bulls and about 250 yearling heifers and a few other bits and pieces that we run here. We don't trade cattle. We are solely a self- replacing herd.
So if you want to take it back a little bit further, you did cover a bit about the family business and how it's structured now. Do you want to talk about how it started out and I guess how did you get to this point?
So our family business is really important to us, and family is really important to our business. So I guess it started out is my dad and mum started this business in 1989, started at Karoo. Prior to that, they were dairy farmers. And so that's the history of it in the sense of how it started out. They were both very successful in their business. And most successful people have come from a tougher background,
and that definitely applies to my father. He was great at mentoring me, and I guess, showing the ropes of how a business works and operates, but he did come from a tougher background, and he definitely taught us how to work, so that's a big thing for us. How has it evolved to what it is now? And like
I said, that's purely through hard work. And I also go by the mantra, the level of effort that you tolerate from yourself will define your life, which puts you in the direction of making those one percenters that keeps you successful and profitable. So even though I say hard work is important, you also got to use a little bit of your knowledge and that outside consultancy work to be successful. And
I think that's how our business has evolved. Because it's a team effort, and it's not just our primary workers, it's the people around us as well that make us the business that we are today. And I think it was through necessity that as a successful business, we need to formalize what we were doing and to get that structure in place to
cement the direction in which we wanted to head. And that's, again, back to the partnership and the agreement, the formal agreement that we have here where Karoo is owned by my family company and then the partnership leases Karoo off that company.
So even though it's a family business, you're running it as a business-
Correct.
... structure.
It's correct.
And everyone has their place and knows what's going on kind of thing, formally.
Correct. Yep, yep. Formally, it's formalized that way. And like I said, previously, we have two permanent staff and involve contractors as needed. And really another important point that, I guess, I want to put out to make our business, the history and how it's involved, no one is successful on their own. It takes a team and it is also important to
learn from your low points. The business constantly presents new challenges and opportunities, and I guess we'll talk about those a bit later on, and new ways to create value. And no one succeeds alone. And I love the saying that you either win or you learn, and that's really important to us. The wins we take and give ourselves a pat on the back, but those businesses and structures that we put in place that probably didn't quite hit the target, we learned from those. So that's important to us.
I've been on site here at Karoo a couple of times and we've had some talks and you've definitely pivoted to your consultants and your people that you use in your businesses as critical and you point to them for the technical questions and things like that. I think that's a-
Correct, correct. They're really important to our business. It is really a team effort. While it's a family business, those consultants we still consider as family and an integral part of our success. They really are.
We might pivot a little bit and go into the operational side of things, into the nitty- gritty, and we might talk about livestock. So I'm just going to throw some things out there and see how we go. Around, I guess, your breeding objectives, and is that a core thing in your business that you look at or is it secondary or how does it fit in?
Ah no, the breeding objectives are probably one of our main objectives, and our main mantra that we go by is consistent, never- ending improvement. We just like to be consistent but improve as we go along. We're not great risk- takers, I have to say that. But we do try and improve year- on- year on what we're breeding. So basically an animal, what we want, is an animal that can target a number of markets because our clients are not, some targeting the
market that we are. There's obviously a number of markets out there that our clients target. That's especially with the bulls that we offer. And we want an animal that is fertile and functional. And also high growth is probably our specialty as we need to get our commercial weaners off at eight months. And we put them into The Blue Ribbon
Weaner sale at Carcoar each year. And we were lucky enough this year to win Best Presented Pen of Steers, and that pen of 94 steers averaged around 370 kilos off their mother, so we're very happy with those. And I think that was a great award to win. And, I guess, justifies what we're doing back here on farm.
So you obviously focus on both sides of the business, like the stud side, but then your commercial side's really important to-
The commercial side is our bread and butter, and that's where, I guess, most of the decisions are made to help that commercial herd improve each year. And it takes up the majority of our hectares, really. It's our bread and butter. And the stud operation, in terms of breeding objectives, our main objectives is to produce that bull that we can sell at two years old. Some we do sell. They're about 20 bulls as yearlings, but the majority of our
sale bulls are rising two- year- olds. And with those, it is a ... to get that bull that's got the phenotype. And also if you want to get into the breeding objectives of numbers, we've got to have good calving ease, fertile growth, carcass traits and including an injection, hopefully, of high IMF in those bulls to get out into commercial herds.
So what are the main strategies for meeting those goals? Do you collect a lot of data in your business?
We collect heaps of data. So the data we collect, well, first start is birth weight. When we tag the calves, this is in the stud herd. We collect birth weight, 200, 400, and 600- day weights. We scan our cattle for EMA, fat, and IMF. We do docility. We also do scrotal measurements, and we also do genomics on all our stud cattle now as well. So we pump as much raw data into the system as we can so we can get the most reliable
EBVs back from TACE. And I guess the strategy for meeting those goals is another saying that I like to say is well done is better than well said. So basically don't talk about it, just do it. And that's a mantra of ours, just get in and do it and get the job done, just make things happen. But in saying that, I also like to be a learner, and you can never lose if you take a useful lesson away from a situation and that leads to a practice change.
So I guess while we like to do those things, if something comes along that is another tool that we could use in our toolbox to improve our breeding objectives, we're aligned to that too. We're always open to new things.
Are you finding that a lot of your clients are asking for that data and they're hungry for that or do they still rely on property and having a look?
It's still on property, but the data that you can provide for them, you see them come with their catalogs and their catalogs are highlighted in all different colors, and red pen and black pen everywhere. The other thing that we do, also do is structural assessment. We get someone into structurally assess our sale bulls. So basically what we're trying to do is we're trying to guarantee our product to the best that we can before it leaves the gate so that leaves us
less open to problems down the track. I'm not saying we're perfect, but I think what we're doing is probably what makes us as successful as what we are.
And I guess following on from that, then, marketing. Like, hey, going in that space and what's your strategies there?
So marketing's a hard one for us. I'm not one to blow our own trumpet, so I have another person that's on our team come in and do that, and her name is Fee, and she's from Hammer and Fields, and she's just a bomb at doing our socials. She started our socials probably around this time last year, and we have nearly tripled our audience in that space, and we get favorable comments on all our socials about how well professionally it is presented and the content of it.
So Fee comes here probably once a month, strolls around, takes her content that she needs to for that day, or if we're doing something in the yards or something that's a bit left of center, I'll send her a few photos of what we're doing for the day. She's always at me for stuff for behind the scenes to do, so we do that. It's just marketing I think has become a very important tool to get a positive message out to the wider industry and to those that are
interested in our industry in the Ag space. So she does that for us. She's exceptional at what she does. And this, again, goes to what I was saying before, it takes a team to succeed. We also engage Brett from Signature Ag Marketing to do our print media for our upcoming bull sale. So the stuff at the Land, Beef Central, all that, Brett organizes our space in that and does our ads for us for that as well.
So between those two people, that's our marketing. In the sense of where we target, well, we try and target our commercial cattle and our steers and our heifers, they pretty much will speak for themselves. They are highly sought after, so not real hard to sell there. And then we target with our bulls. We primarily sell our bulls to a local area, probably within a 200 or 300 kilometer radius. But in saying that, I've sold bulls to every state and
territory except for the Northern Territory in Australia. So we're fairly well known throughout the industry, and our cattle pretty much will speak for ourselves. I guess that's my marketing, which I've had the little blinkers on for that. And that's when Fee came in last year and said, " I think you need to wake up and you need to get out there and promote yourself a bit more," which is doing a great job of.
So back into the nitty- gritty. Calendar of operations, what's your cycle like annually?
So there's always something going on. There's never a dull day at Karoo's. But I guess as a summary, February is busy with Gareth planning our winter feed.
So here's your pastures man.
Yeah, he's our pastures man. We talk about him a bit later on, get onto pastures, but he's our grass manager. He's our GM, we call him. He's our grass manager. So February is busy with him planning our winter feed. Then we move on to March, I guess, is our weaning and our sale of our commercial steers and our excess females. The excess females that we sell are usually those that are under 300 kilos. That's our first process of seeing which heifers we keep and which heifers we
sell in the commercial herd. That's our first indicator. So if they're under three kilos, they go at weaning time. And then April is preg testing. June is busy with AI of our autumn stud cows and heifers. Also scanning of our sale bulls. Semen testing of our sale bulls is in June as well. July, I guess we start calving, both the stud and commercial herd. August is bull sale month, so that's a really, really big month for us to get ready for the bull sale.
In our commercial herd, in September, the bulls go out. In October, we start spraying out paddocks that will be cropped the following year and breeding our stud cattle. November is weaning the autumn stud calves. And, I guess, that's a quick overview, but we've always got something going on.
How are you finding this season this year where, what, are we middle of May now, it looks like there's a bit of feed around at the moment.
Yeah, it's not too bad. It's probably getting a bit too cold for us to grow any grass. But our crops, we were lucky enough with Gareth and the way he managed it that we've got all our young stock on crop at the minute, whether that be wheat. We've got paddocks of wheat, grazing wheat, and the rest is oats and ryegrass. So we're lucky that way that the young cattle and bulls
are on crop at the minute, so they're looking really well. Commercial cattle are just dry at the minute, so they're out in the bush and feeding for themselves. And it'll just gets a bit tricky now this time of the year to start managing our autumn calving cows, which is only a portion of our stud herd. We only calve in the autumn. Just gets a bit tricky managing them with the lack of growth in the grass and a few issues with grass technique that comes round, but we manage that the best we can.
Because around, I guess, Meadow flat, and what do you say, 1100 at the highest point, it's quite a high altitude there and bit of a cool winter.
Yes. Yes, no, well, I think winter's fairly well upon us if you look about today. But it is cold. It's a cold temperate climate. I like it because it definitely has the four distinct seasons that we have, but where we are does make it a bit tricky in the sense that our autumn and winter are probably a bit longer than most. We won't get grass growth now until about probably middle of September, so it will really start to fire along. But yeah, it's a good climate to be
in and it's somewhere that ... We've been here for 30 years, or over 30 years now, and I guess we know what we're up against as the seasons progress and change and we'll manage that the best we can.
And have you set up your calendar operations to meet that sort of environment, then to grow?
Correct. Yeah, correct. So that's why we calve a bit later. We calve July, August, but generally towards the end of July. And our main carving month is August, a few into September, but we carve a bit later than others around because we just want to prevent that or lessen that grass technique issue. We'll never ever get rid of it, but it's an issue that is big for us in this Tablelands area.
I think we've segued beautifully into the pastures section.
Into pastures. As I said, Gareth is our GM. He's our grass manager, so I guess-
I do enjoy watching your pastures from the roadside.
Well-
Always good to see what you guys are up to.
... Gareth does a good job on that. So I guess our pasture types, we place a great emphasis on our pastures as they're the number one thing that determines our success. Because if we don't have good pastures, we can't get that weight gain. We don't have cattle that are healthy, shiny. It's just something that we really, really need to be our number
one focus. So when we're doing new pasture, it consists of a mixture similar to forefront perennial ryegrass, hummer fescue, prairie grass, choice chicory, and a few clovers like arrowleaf, coolamon, and sub, and also a bit of brace white clover in there as well. That's our energy or our go- to mix that really suits all our types of livestock and categories of livestock. So it's something that we just have something in similar to that in each paddock that
we regenerate. So it also helps with cattle if when we're moving them from paddock to paddock, they're not having to change their gut system to focus or align with something else. The consistency makes it important for us as we move cattle around.
How long do those, like your perennial pastures, how long do they last for in your system?
If we look after them well enough probably around that 20 to 25 year mark. And by that time, I guess, it's just like anything, there's always something better. So there's a better variety of the chicory. There might be a better variety of the ryegrass that we use and they've run their course in that 20, 25 years. A paddock gets a bit tired.
So you're applying fertilizer during each year, or?
I, also, as part of our team, we also have a consult agronomist. Gareth is an agronomist by trade anyway, but we also have an outside agronomist that comes in. Which, they're good. They really bounce ideas off each other really well. So it does help to have those people on board, but we always did a fertilizer program prior to them
coming on board. But I guess what's changed, and this is part of the improvement that you get from outside consultants, what's changed is we've done a lot of soil testing and we soil tested the whole place. So now fertilizer lime goes on those soil test results, so it's paddock- based now. So that even goes down to how many kilos of fertilizer lime we put on each paddock. That changes for each paddock or an area of the farm that we focus on for that particularly. But every year
the farm gets fertilized. And then on top of that, if funds allow, then we do go into that liming program or that chicken manure program or whatever we think we can do to better the pastures and the quality of pasture that we get out, plus the matter of the increase in dry matter per hectare that we can make the farm work. The farm's got to work for us, otherwise we don't have a successful business. And like I said, pasture's number one in making that business work.
And I think having those soil tests that's information on that paddock there and then they're not that expensive soil test-
No.
... compared to just broad spectrum.
That's right. And that's where you throw out your fertilizer, your old single super like we did 10 years ago. Then, sure, that's fine. You get a result from that. But if we can apply it to each paddock specifically and apply the right nutrients to that paddock, that gives us the extra grass growth, and I guess that stops us from having to feed out and the time and the money that that costs. We'd rather put the money into getting it right in the first place and trying to avoid ...
I'm not saying that we avoid feeding altogether, like our climate doesn't allow us, we have to feed during winter at times, and especially when we start calving, and our autumn calving cows, they do take a bit more feed than spring calving cows, but that's just for the bull program that we operate that we have to have those.
So that's what we do with our pastures, and I think it's a really important point to point out that it is paddock- based and it is something that we really focus on throughout the year.
Do you have goals for those individual paddocks then as well or, in terms of the, I guess you've planted it at, say, year one and you've got a certain ratio of those different species, and then over time selection of grazing and things might change your components of legumes and grasses and things like that. Do you monitor that and just check it or am I getting a bit nitty- gritty?
No, no, no, you're right. No, no, no, no. We do monitor, and I guess monitoring the sense of eye appeal, like we do, but the best thing to tell us whether we are doing the right or wrong thing is the animals pick and choose different grasses and species and then that makes us fine tune what we're doing. We found that they love the chicory, and we've got a couple of paddocks here where it's actually, we've let itself seed, and it is actually becoming quite prominent within the paddock,
so it's probably overtaking it a little bit. But we love it. They love it. So it's great. It takes a bit for us to get over the fact of looking at it, that it's not a broadleaf weed, as we do have problems with broadleaf weeds. So we, first few years, we were just having trouble with that, but now we just love it. It's a great feed. And if things are a bit tight, there's a couple of paddocks that we've got that we actually put the bulls on.
If we've had a bit of a tight year and we can't put them on the oats because there's not enough oats for them, we put them on a couple of these paddocks and they just do pretty much as well on this because it's highly chicory- based pasture.
So I guess on those weeds, do you have any big challenging weed problems?
We have a few weed problems, and our main challenge is a couple of weeds in Paterson's curse, fleabane, and just broadleaf weeds in general. We have, and particularly in our granite country, not so much in our basalt country, but particularly in our granite country, it's a difficult or tricky soil to manage.
Is it because of the ground cover?
Yeah, it is. Probably a ground cover because it's harder ground and it's harder to get your pastures established to the extent that we need them established. So it is that the species aren't, or that there's just not that ground cover there to outcompete the weeds. So that is a bit of a problem, but just like anything, you have to manage it and-
Put the GM onto it.
Yeah, put the GM onto it, and he gets his spray rig out and away he goes. But the pastures are what makes us and the high performing cattle, and like I said, the cattle lets you know when some paddocks are not performing the way that you need them to and they need some attention. And then with weeds, I guess another weed that we have trouble with is Chilean needle grass, and it's found along our creeks and waterways, and it's pretty hard to get rid of. We try
and heavily graze it. If we can't do that, we try and keep it at bay. It doesn't spread too far from the creeks and waterways that we've got here, but if it's in a paddock that we're regenerating, then obviously it gets sprayed out and that's how we control it then. So they're probably our main weeds or so you just have other weeds come up, temporary, like thistles and things like that, but we've got them fairly well under control now. Other weeds like blackberries and things like that,
we have a program. We have someone come in and spray those each year and try and keep them at bay too. Also, probably tussocks is another one that we're just getting on top of at the moment. They've probably got away a little bit on us with a couple of wet years that we've had, but yeah, we're getting on top of them this year and we'll have them under control again. So spraying and getting on top of our weeds is integral to our success too.
Especially keeping those pastures long- term.
That's it. That's right. And like I said, pastures is our king, and we need to look after them.
I might do a bit of a selfless, I don't know if it's selfless, more selfish, plug on the New South Wales WeedWise app. That's always a handy source for weeds if you want to have a look at how to identify and then the impact that they could potentially have on your biosecurity duty, but also some control options and outlines your chemicals. So download that app if you want to have a bit more info on any of those weeds or any weeds that you think you've got on your place as well.
Thanks for listening to part one of our two- part conversation. If you've enjoyed it as much as we did, you can catch the rest of this chat in our next episode. This episode of Seeds for Success is supported by the Australian Government through funding from the Natural Heritage Trust under the Climate Smart Agriculture Program and delivered by Local Land Services, a member of the Commonwealth Regional Delivery Partners panel. Thanks for listening. This podcast was brought to you by Central
West Local Land Services. Local Land Services delivers advice and support to farmers, landholders, and the community across New South Wales. To learn more, you can find us online by searching for Central West Local Land Services. If you'd like more information about the topics we discuss today, as well as links to relevant articles, fact sheets, events, and other helpful resources, we've added those into the show notes for this episode. You can find them by tapping or swiping over the
cover art in your podcast player now. Hey, and while you're there, please leave us a five- star review. It really helps other farmers find the show. I'm your host, Neroli Brennan, and I'll chat to you next time.