Silverstream Spectra S184 earned a winning bid of $65,000 to set a new record for the Charolais breed for the Fisher family at Canterbury’s Silverstream Charolais and Herefords stud. Photo / Tim Cronshaw
Silverstream Spectra S184 earned a winning bid of $65,000 to set a new record for the Charolais breed for the Fisher family at Canterbury’s Silverstream Charolais and Herefords stud. Photo / Tim Cronshaw
A Charolais stalwart would have been proud of the next generation building on the legacy of a family stud with a top-priced bull, writes Tim Cronshaw.
The late Bruce Fisher would have been in his element the moment the hammer fell for bidding to close at $65,000 for a Charolais bull valued for its hornless genetic line.
A two-way contest developed for the bull between breeding syndicates until a surprise stand by a commercial farmer forced one of them to make one more bid.
Leading up to that morning the Fisher family of Maureen, son Brent and his wife Anna had little inkling that Silverstream Spectra S184 would set a national record price for the breed and a personal best for them.
That was until they saw the two parties lining up at their Silverstream Charolais and Hereford stud’s on-farm sale at Lochlea property near Canterbury’s Lake Ellesmere and recognised something special was happening.
Bidding between them looked to have peaked at $60,000 until the commercial under-bidder, who’d dropped out earlier on, re-entered for a final stab. It was pure theatre.
Onlookers wondered if yet another Australian stud had pulled a last-minute ploy, but this wasn’t the case.
In the end Lot 3 in the catalogue went to a syndicate of Hemingford Sheep and Cattle Genetics, Twin River Charolais and Australian stud Palgrove Charolais after they had to dig deeper in their pockets.
Brent and Anna Fisher agree that Bruce’s eyes would’ve lit up if he’d been there and he would have revelled in the twists and turns of the heated auction.
Until the day he died in January, he continued to follow the stud’s progress with the same enthusiasm as the day he and Maureen started it in 1968.
“I would pick him up and we would always go around the bulls,” Brent said.
“This year’s crop, he just thought they were a great line of bulls. It wasn’t just the top-selling bull - he thought they overall were a tremendous lineup.”
“That would’ve just been the highlight for him,” Anna said.
“Brent’s mother was there and she’s always had a huge involvement with her and Bruce always going on a South Island visit to the bull buyers and clients and they loved that.
“The sale meant so much for her because she knew the people and she was sad Bruce wasn’t there and cried when that bull sold. And number three was Bruce’s favourite number.”
The stud founder would also have appreciated the milestone for the younger Fishers’ work to breed polled Charolais.
This was the first year that all the bulls in the catalogue were polled and the 53-strong lineup was all sold. The 57 registered buyers attending live and 27 online buyers were their highest turnout.
Brent said they’d slowly worked towards polled breeding as they didn’t want to rush it at the expense of the basics and other traits.
Red-coloured Spectra is a homozygous polled bull and the couple credit much of this factor for driving up the auction price.
“He was a good bull and possibly would have made $15,000 or $16,000 as a commercial bull, I would’ve thought, somewhere around there,” Anna said.
“He probably would’ve been a commercial bull if he wasn’t polled because other stud breeders had their eyes on something else. There were only two stud breeders who wanted that bull and we know that they want homozygous polled.”
The couple rated him as one of their best bulls in the catalogue and deliberated whether to keep him or not, finally retaining the right to collect semen from him. His sire was a heterozygous polled bull and his mother was a homozygous polled cow.
A homozygous polled bull possesses two copies of the poll variant of the gene. That means it will only have polled offspring - whether the other parent is polled or horned - and can’t pass on horns. Charolais are traditionally horned.
Anna said there seems to be more polled interest in the stud game because farmers don’t want to de-horn them or go through the paperwork of being accredited to use pain relief.
“We have been chipping away at that over the past eight years on this polling gene and now the big thing is to get a homozygous polled bull. That’s what people want - a homozygous polled bull over their stud cows so all the bull calves they are selling to the industry are polled. And the commercial guys want - not all of them but the majority of them - polled cattle.”
Silverstream Charolais and Herefords stud co-owners Brent and Anna Fisher take the same long-term view with beef cattle breeding as Brent’s late father did. Photo / Tim Cronshaw
Anna said they’d worked hard to turn around the perception of polled Charolais in the past coming out of North America as tall and lanky bulls without the same muscling or performance.
A turning point was breeding Silverstream Evolution E168, a heterozygous polled bull with one copy of the polled gene. Over a horned cow, only 50 per cent of its progeny are going to be polled and over another heterozygous polled cow, 25 per cent of the offspring will be horned.
“He was the most powerful and most beautiful bull we’d ever used so he was a great base for our polled cattle and to shrug off some of those pre-conceived ideas that polled was weaker,” she said.
“Since then we’ve bred bulls that were homozygous polled like Manhattan and National born in 2016 and 2017 and they were pretty grunty bulls so we’ve been doing this homozygous thing for quite some time now.”
About five years ago Silverstream was getting about a 65 per cent polled calf drop. Last year they had four horned calves - all heifers - among 252 calves.
Brent said they’d made enough ground now towards polled Charolais that they didn’t necessarily feel their herd had to be entirely homozygous polled.
“We retained a bull this year which we just think is as nice a bull as we’ve ever had and he’s heterozygous polled. We wouldn’t put him over a horned cow because you will end up 50:50, but he has a place in our breeding programme. We’ve got enough polled in our system that it doesn’t matter if we use heterozygous polls.”
That doesn’t mean that they will deviate from polled breeding with the family gaining exclusive rights to the semen last year from SCX Jehu, a homozygous polled bull from Canada that broke records after selling for more than $300,000.
DNA technology identifies whether a bull calf is homozygous after a test is sent to Australia. They’ve also tested their cow herd with about 50 homozygous polled cows going to the bull this year out of the 285 calving.
The Fishers predict they will also have another 35 or 40 homozygous polled heifer calves to add to this mix.
Silverstream is based jointly at the family’s irrigated Lochlea farm on the flat near Lake Ellesmere and a dryland hill country farm at nearby Ataahua.
Both of them are about 550 hectares with the hill property acting as a wintering block for more than 350 purebred cows and the ewes spending much of their time there too.
Just 4km separate these properties with mobs of sheep and cattle walked down a quiet country road and briefly going across the Christchurch to the Akaroa Highway to get to each block.
Silverstream Spectra S184 has sold for $65,000 at Canterbury’s Silverstream Charolais and Herefords stud. Photo / Tim Cronshaw
Ataahua is home base for the younger Fishers with the cows run over the winter on steep north-facing faces overlooking McQueens Valley and calved on easier blocks closer to the house.
This farm dries off in the summer so the Charolais cows and their 2-week-old calves are progressively shifted in small mobs from September to Lochlea, while the Herefords and about 1000 breeding ewes tend to stay at the hill block year-round.
When the Charolais purebred herd is weaned in March the in-calf cows return to the hill country as the lower property gets damp underfoot in the winter months and can’t be crowded. Only the weaned Charolais and Hereford purebred bull and heifer calves remain at Lochlea from their breeding stock.
Another 500 trading cattle are also finished at Lochlea, mainly young Charolais-cross stock bought from their clients and up to 8000 crossbred lambs with many of them sourced from Banks Peninsula.
Silverstream will calve about 285 registered Charolais cows this year and 80 purebred Herefords, including 2-year-olds. Another 130 Charolais heifer calves and 35 Hereford heifer calves are also carried.
The Herefords have become an integral part of the operation, with the stud originating from Anna’s parents, Jill and Peter Smyth, in Hawke’s Bay.
They still come down each year for a client trip in autumn, two weeks over the calving peak and during the bull sale, helping out during the Canterbury A&P Show until the family had a break six years ago.
Anna has decided to renew this connection and has pairs of Charolais and Hereford heifers lined up for a return to the ring.
The family has an outstanding record in the Meat & Wool Cup, and they want to support the many volunteers who make the show happen.
“So we’ve won it nine times and Bruce always wanted to win the 10th one,” she said.
“And Brucey loved the show - he liked to win. So when I came back from the show last year I told him I’m going to make a comeback and he was like: ‘That’s what we need, love, that’s what we need to do’. He was so excited.”
This Charolais trio are getting ready to move on to new pastures after being sold at the Fisher family’s successful Canterbury’s Silverstream Charolais and Hereford stud on-farm sale. Photo / Tim Cronshaw
Typically, they run three Hereford sires over this breeding herd, while nine sires - usually five older bulls and yearlings put over the heifers - go to the Charolais. Early calvers are artificially inseminated for an end-of-August drop.
The couple are happy to see recognition building for the breed.
Brent said their sale result and turnout was a reflection of how the breed was being perceived commercially now.
Stud breeders are getting good market signals from people wanting to buy their bulls and much more crossbreeding is going on among commercial farmers than a few years ago.
He said the canning of live imports to China has made them rethink their operations.
“They would breed all their cattle straight-bred because they could put their surplus heifers on a boat and send them to China at 200kg and get $1200.
“That’s gone now and if you have a whole herd of straight animals you only need a certain number of heifers as replacements, so a number of people we had buying commercially this year want to go into Charolais to get more growth out of the rest of them.”
Anna said they might put their poorer heifers to a Charolais bull to get hybrid vigour and lift the performance, growth and yield of the bottom end of their herd.
“You can have two 600kg liveweight animals - if they are straight Angus or Herefords they’re probably going to yield a dressing percentage of 54 per cent, whereas the 600kg Charolais is going to yield 58 per cent,” she said.
“It’s not uncommon to have 25kg or 26kg difference of carcass weight. When you calculate it out at $5.70 a kg or $6 a kg that’s more than the 10c a kg to 20c a kg premium that they’re getting [for breed programmes].”
The dairy industry is looking for short gestation, low birthweight and calving ease in bulls with a meatier performance.
Dairy farmers are becoming more open-minded about Charolais as a result of seeing the results of the breed’s beef sire, Kakahu Gerry, for their mating programmes.
This is picking up as dairy farmers tackle their bobby calf issues and work to develop male calves that rearers and finishers want.
Encouraging for the Fishers is their homozygous polled Silverstream Padra bull is being singled out for its medium frame and length of bone, medium birthweight, short gestation and calving ease.
Anna said the “super muscly” bull had been identified around the world by stud breeders for these traits with calves in Australia and Canada and semen sold in the United States and South Africa.
“He’s been identified as a bull that other stud breeders want to use because he’s such a great Charolais bull. He’s the ideal-type Charolais bull yet he’s a great fit for the dairy industry. We sold five of Padra’s sons in our sale to other studs because they want to supply bulls to the dairy industry.”
When Silverstream Charolais was set up in the late 1960s the breed was only being introduced into New Zealand.
Bruce and Maureen were on a town milk supply dairy farm in Greenpark with an interest in beef cattle as a sideline. They moved to Charolais when they started looking around for a larger type of beef cattle.
Their herd began from imported semen bred to three Friesian cows and in the 1980s the couple sold their own cows when they leased and eventually bought 70 females from the Copeland family’s Brookfield Charolais herd.
Brent said his father was always big on structure as a stockman and a stickler for not getting carried away with the latest fad or fashion.
He worked to produce moderate and meaty bulls which are quiet and structurally sound, and took a long-term view with breeding, he said.
“He was of the opinion that the people who buy the bulls need to be happy so the bulls need to have everything right.
“Even on sales day when they might be chasing a number or whatever, after they’ve bought the bull they will forget about the numbers and other things and they will remember what the bull’s like.
“He was always big on the fundamentals and commercially orientated. Everything came back to the end product and what type of finishing steers the bulls would produce.”
He was there to see the family first claim the national Charolais record price last year of $50,000 for Silverstream Sandown to Piopio’s Auahi Charolais - since surpassed by Spectra’s $65,000.
Sandown is a homozygous polled bull and the first son of Turnbulls Duty-Free.
That was a moment for celebration as the previous mark of $45,000 for Greenwood Park Rangi had been set decades earlier.
Two days before Fisher Senior died, he told his family, looking back, he wouldn’t change his life for the world as he’d been blessed to have many good people close to him in his life and be part of a wonderful industry.
Brent said Bruce’s philosophy remained with the family, his Charolais and stud.
In the past Charolais found it difficult to prise a larger place between the two main breeds and deserved to have greater numbers, he said.
“One thing Bruce always said was that: ‘It’s pretty tough, but you have to make sure you’re that good that you’re not ignored and you’ve got to be better than good’.”
