Legacy Speckle Park at Theodore, recently hosted their third Annual Online Bull and Female sale with a spectacular result.
A two-year-old bull ‘Legacy Pason 158F’ sold for $19,000 to a partnership of Oakey Creek Speckle Park of Manilla, NSW, (Dennis and Lou Saint), and Barkly Speckle Park, (Brett and Donna Becker) of Murgon, QLD, Australia.
Legacy Pason 158F along with two other bulls will be sent off to draw semen for export back to Australia.
The export sale came about largely because of a long-term dedication to building the Speckle Park breed, said Josh Vogel.
“Early on, nearly 20 years ago when Legacy was first establishing their purebred Speckle Park herd we foresaw that the breed with its initially small breeding population would benefit from long term genetic diversity,” he said.
As a result Legacy ultimately developed a Speckle Park herd that is genetically unrelated and removed from the other herds in Canada and throughout the world.
“For Legacy the commitment to quality and the intense selection over all these years is finally beginning to pay off through international interest as well as commercial clients returning for bulls and females,” said Vogel.
“The goal has always been to educate the interested and to give the skeptic something to consider.”
Keeping quality as the key element of the herd has helped too.
“It has been doubly important with a new breed like this to cull harder and breed better than any of the established breeds,” said Vogel. “This can be said for many of the first exotic cattle that came before us.”
As for genetics going ‘Down Under’, Vogel explained the Australian partners originally purchased two bulls from their first online sale and then immediately began negotiations with Legacy Speckle Park to start sourcing embryos from their cow herd and their first bulls.
The first pure Legacy calves arrived amidst the worst drought their country has ever seen last August.
Another shipment was implanted for calving in August 2020.
“The plan is to establish herds of pure Legacy Speckle Park in Australia to service their demand for outcross genetics to other stud farms and cross with commercial cattle to improve the carcass quality and feedlot gains with better feed conversion,” said Vogel.
Vogel said so far the Speckle Park breed has been turning heads in their new home.
“Australia has seen an explosion of popularity for Speckle Park cattle to use on their current herds, one breed that has developed from the improvement in meat quality with the Speckle is the Brahckle,” he said.
The Brahckle combines Brahma and Speckle Park genetics.
“These F1 bulls will be what the Beckers will primarily be raising for Northern Australia to run on the pure Brahman cow herds,” said Vogel. “One potential client of Becker said he will “try out” his Brahckle bulls, but he needs 400 bulls to properly test them out in the environment, if they work he would be in the market for many more than that annually.
“Some of the ranches in the north run a hundred thousand head of cows, and the Brahman is the only cow able to handle the heat.”
Oakey Creek will be providing genetics for the purebred and commercial beef operations in the southern parts of Australia.
