History
High Country Droughtmasters began in 2010 after seeing how successful Droughtmaster females were within our commercial cattle. They were low maintenance, easy calving, milked well and showed high tick and buffalo fly resistance. They dealt well with both extremes of heat in summer and frosted pasture during winter and in our opinion, Droughtmaster females were clearly the ultimate "base" for both pure and crossbreeding programs.
Initially, we aimed to build a herd built of higher content females to ensure calving ease, good mothering and doing ability and purchased multiple Billabong bulls over this time to help us retain our home bred heifers. Over time, from this base herd, we have added a multitude of sires from successful herds such as Glenlands, Oasis, Glen Fosslyn, Rondel, Yaralla, Locarno, Valera Vale and Bryvonlea to further strengthen our genetics.
We now operate a stud herd of 250 registered breeders and an unregistered purebred commercial herd of 450 breeders over almost 10,000 acres in the Somerset region. 95% of our replacement females are now homebred and our knowledge of the cow family history together with excellent sire data ensures we are improving our herd each year by selecting truly superior females. We also purchase a handful of heifers annually that we believe are exceptional, to ensure we maintain a variety of bloodlines and to support fellow breeders.
We also have built close partnerships with three co-operative breeders who run their own purebred registered and unregistered breeders and with whom we share a range of bulls from our sire battery annually. All together, we have the ability to mate 1550 purebred females to our registered Droughtmaster sires. It also allows us to use increased selection pressure on each calf drop to ensure the animals we offer exceed our stringent criteria.
Today, we are extremely proud of the herd that we have created. Vision and planning has ensured that it is a fertile productive herd, genetically diverse and now self generating. Growing in quality and consistency year after year. We are excited about the future!
The annual on property sale
We annually offer between 40-60 bulls annually, with our cattle sold to areas as far as Western Australia, South Australia, Atherton Tablelands and St George, as well as many that sell locally. We very much appreciate the support from both new and return clients and look forward to the sale growing and evolving over the future years.
For our 2021 sale, we saw a 100% clearance for the day with bulls topping at $22,500 and averaging $11,097 and heifers topping at $7,000 twice and averaging $4,275.
