More Bull From Queensland

Posted on Wed 02/08/2023 by TonyfromOz

By Anton Lang ~

I have written some Posts about the Beef Cattle Industry in Australia across the years, most recently, about Texas Longhorns. If you’re interested, here’s the link to those earlier Posts. It all started back in 2010 when my good lady wife and I arrived in Rockhampton, where we lived for eight years as we watched our Granddaughter grow up from her last year at Primary School, through High School, and until she went into the work force as an assured young woman, and she is now running a large scale Hairdressing business, which she has been doing since she was 21 years old. We had visited Rocky three times before moving there, and each time, I noticed a pleasant little quirk about the city. Scattered throughout the city were a number of statues of cattle, not just as stand alone statues of cattle in prominent places, but also mounted on buildings of businesses around the city as well, and not just a couple of them, but almost a dozen businesses. I took some images of those cattle, well, the ones I could find at the time of that original Post in 2010, because, over the ensuing years of our residence in that city, I discovered a number of others as well.

At the Capricornia – Beef Central In Australia (Part One) Post, I linked into five separate articles at the ABC News site here in Australia, Now, these articles had a very fleeting appearance at that News site, usually appearing for just a couple of hours before disappearing, so more often than not I missed them. The article which started it all was about those Texas Longhorn Cattle, and luckily, that was one of those articles which I actually did see before it disappeared.

The same happened again just yesterday with an article about Australia’s most expensive bull, a Brahman which sold in 2017 for a phenomenal price of $325,000, and some people don’t pay that much for a house. Nowadays, rather than ‘put’ the bull to a Heifer, (well, they’re too expensive for that) what they do is collect semen from the bull, and sell that semen, which is artificially inseminated into those heifers, and I’ll explain that in a little more detail, later on, but here’s an image of that bull. (Now, while this image is sized to best fit the page, if you click on the image, it will open on a new page and at a much larger size)

Yeah! What you lookin’ at? Brahman Bull NCC Justified. (Image supplied: KB Consulting)

Here’s the link to that article.

And, speaking as an outright amateur, to me, that looks like a truly amazing specimen, but the real experts, the Cattle Station Owners must see things that the average person has no comprehension whatsoever about.

Okay, I mentioned the sale of the semen from this particular bull. The North Queensland Graziers (that’s what they call them here in Australia, whilst in the U.S. they are referred to as Ranchers.) in question were Mark and Pam Prichard, and they purchased ten ‘Straws’ of semen from this Bull, and for each Straw, they paid $2400, so $24,000 all up is what they paid, umm, and for that money, I’d be hoping for a really nice car. This was at the Big Country Brahman Sale in Charters Towers, in North Queensland.

Sometimes, depending on the bull, a straw of semen might cost $10, and a Grazier might pay as much as a few hundred dollars for one straw for an absolute premium product, so this outlay was a phenomenal amount of money. Now, years ago, one straw of semen used for Artificial Insemination might be used in total on one heifer for one calf.

Nowadays, using a similar process to human artificial insemination, and using Embryo Technology, that one straw of semen will be used for TEN embryos, each one then inseminated into a heifer, so each straw could produce ten calves, so the ten straws could result in 100 calves with the genetics of that magnificent bull shown in that image.

Sometimes, an article in the news is actually interesting, and this was another on of those, related to beef cattle.

Go and read the article at the above link, because in times when news is always so serious, it’s so good to read a story about something that is interesting and positive in its nature, and just a darned good story really.

Anton Lang uses the screen name of TonyfromOz, and he writes at this site, PA Pundits International on topics related to electrical power generation, from all sources, concentrating mainly on Renewable Power, and how the two most favoured methods of renewable power generation, Wind Power and all versions of Solar Power, fail comprehensively to deliver levels of power required to replace traditional power generation. His Bio is at this link.

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