About
Finniss River Station (FRS) is approx. 120 km south west of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia. The property is subject to the harsh tropics of Northern Australia, high temperatures and high humidity make working the land difficult and is only suited to the bos indicus breeds of cattle.
Rainfall is high, generally over 2 meters falls in the region, making accessibility a problem in the wet season. FRS is approx. 50 000 Ha with nearly half that area subjected to seasonal flooding.
These seasonally flooded areas(flood plains) are essential for our Dry Season grazing enabling our cattle to graze green feed all the way through the dry season. At FRS we run Brahman cattle, predominantly greys and reds. We have our own breeding herd producing high quality weaners for the live export trade to South East Asia.
As time went on at FRS we really needed a way to increase our gross margin as we appeared to hit what we thought was our maximum carrying capacity. We relised that if we cleared more land for pasture improvement we could increase gross margin but escalating costs in fuel and labour made that option unfavourable for now, not to mention the difficulty we had in waiting for approval to clear native vegetation from the lands department.
It was through people we know in the industry that I heard about the “Grazing For Profit” course. This course is offered by Resource Consulting Services Ptl Ltd, of Yeppoon QLD. I attended the course in March 2007 in Katherine for 8 days.
“WOW” This course has completely changed my way of thinking. The course covered the following areas, Principles of business management, nutrition, reproduction, time management, WOTB, ecology, cell grazing and business planning. It was the principles of cell grazing that really got me excited. After proposing the cell grazing system to the family, and having all agree to give it a try we went into full swing. We now have a cell grazing rotation on our floodplains and will have a wet season rotation commencing soon (December 07).
The idea of the website came to me as people in our industry were keen to know how we were progressing with the implementation of such an intense grazing system. So I will document the whole process from fencing to watering and will also eventually include cattle weight gain data.
Happy browsing Robert Venturin
