Flexibility is a skill that cannot be underestimated in the cattle industry, the ability to pivot and adapt to market demands is crucial and the Erbacher family of Kalang Grazing have it well and truly figured out.
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Paul and Majella Erbacher, along with their son Adam, run a Hereford and Angus breeder herd on their properties at Guluguba and Taroom.
Ms Erbacher said the choice of breeds was an easy one for the family.
"Paul's mum and dad had Herefords and my parents had Angus," she said.
"Many, many years ago I was told you are either born into the breed, marry into it, or just plain like it, and we are all three."
While they have seen some impressive results from their black baldy-cross cattle this season, the Erbachers believe it is well worth retaining a nucleus herd of each breed, which they were able to do after purchasing more property at Taroom in 2015.
"We want to keep the nucleus herds because majority of all the herds around the place have originated from the British breeds, and they've done everybody a good job," Paul said.
"There's a lot of cross breeding going on at the moment, but some people will have to start back somewhere."
Adam said the family have found both breeds to perform consistently over the years, allowing them to experiment with their breeding decisions and improve their genetics over time, while offering various market options.
"Herefords and Angus are our two base herds, they both do a really good job for us, and we've also got some crossbred cows coming through now as well," he said.
"We've got the black baldy-cross, which we entered into the local show feedlot competition and had them on improved pasture for 40 days, and they were averaging 1.5kg a day, so you can't complain about that."
Those sentiments were echoed by Paul, who said the competition offered vital benchmarking data.
"When we first started, the Angus were always a little bit behind in the weight gain, but you picked it up on the cross and you were always getting more cents per kilo," he said.
"I think we've actually picked things up so that they're equal to the Herefords, and actually this year they just outdid the Herefords by an average of one or two kilos.
"The best of the whole lot are our cross-bred black baldies, you can't beat them for fertility, weight, gain, everything. They're one of the best crosses you can get."
The Erbachers purchased four Hereford bulls at the Talbalba sale this year, two of which Adam said were their most expensive purchases ever.
He said they had been buying bulls from the Reid family for about 15 years and were always impressed with the results.
Paul said since they had utilised semen testing and switched to shorter joining periods, they were running bulls at a rate of two per cent rather than three, and were able to outlay more money for the bulls that they were chasing, with quality EBVs.
"EBVs are one of the first things we look at, and every bull we buy now must stand in line somewhere with our EBVs, otherwise we don't even look at him," he said.
"Before we started with EBVs, it was really down to a personal choice and everybody had a different way of looking at it.
"I think first of all, you've got to work out in the whole scheme of things, what are you aiming for in your end product."
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Ms Erbacher agreed, saying: "being able to buy those quality bulls is great because you can see the traits filtering back through the herd, it's all happening finally."
While fertility is at the top of the traits checklist, Paul said that the introduction of EBVs had also been a game changer in improving calving ease within the herd, which is something they had been striving for during the past two decades.
"When fixing our calving ease, to start with, we probably lost weight gain but we've turned that around in the last five or six years," he said.
"We could hardly tell the difference in the calves from the first calf heifers to the cow herd when we were branding, they blended right in this year."
Paul said that stocking rates had also been something that they had modified over the years, initially dialling herd numbers back to focus on the basics, before ramping up again in recent years.
"When I started having a bit more of a say in the place, I was working on less numbers, better quality and more weight," he said.
"We were running less numbers and still turning off the same amount of kilos per acre, so making the same amount of money with less cattle.
"That obviously has flow-on effects, on your paddocks and those kind of things, but after many years of that, we've been able to pick our numbers back up again, getting the program going with our feed, paddocks and rotations."
Five years ago, the Erbachers begun running multiple joining cycles to establish ultimate market flexibility, something which they said has been working well for their program.
"We've got two different joining periods now, so that increased the spread a bit," Paul said.
"We were just breeding one lot of cows and then buying trade cattle to fill the gap, but we decided to go back to just running breeders, but on multiple cycles.
"We're actually utilising our bulls a lot more now too, by running them on a couple of cycles."
Adam shared the sentiment, saying it allowed the family to easily move with market trends.
"With two joining cycles too, whatever is hot that month for sale cattle, we've got something for them," Adam said.
"If they want heavy feeders or if they want lighter feeders, we can be flexible with which market we chase at that time."
This year, the Erbachers joined just over 1500 females across their whole herd.
