Welcome to our website. The following pages will lead you through our farms and our herd. We are proud of both the farms and our herd, both having been built up virtually from scratch.

The home farm "Brightview" at Candelo of nearly 140 acres is used for all calvings and reproduction exercises, as well as the growing out farm for bull weaners. We have undercover work areas for the AI and ET work, with side working areas for the technicians for thawing and freezing of genetics.

Once mating have been done with AI and ET, the cows and calves are moved up the road 5 kilometers to the bigger 300 acre "Ticehurst". There the cows and calves are run with a cover bull selected from our previous year's bull calvings.The cover bull is with the cows for a strict 7 weeks and is then removed. All cows are preg tested at 7 weeks after AI/ET and again at 12 weeks after AI/ET. Any female empty at this stage is culled. We do not play favorites.

The heifers selected to come into the stud herd are synchronised and AI mated to suitable bulls and they too are then removed to "Ticehurst", again with a cover bull selected from the bull herd for calving ease. The remainder of the heifers are single-sire mated and sold PTIC or calved down and sold as heifers with CAF or some are retained into the recipient herd.. As with the cows, all heifers are preg tested at 7 weeks after AI and again at 12 weeks after AI. All empty animals are culled.

All bull calves, once they are weaned and transported back to the home farm "Brightview",, are vaccinated, drenched and introduced to feed. They are run firstly in the one group and over time they are culled down to,at most, three bull groups. These groups are then grown out individually. It is from these separate groups that sale bulls are selected and then introduced to each other to further their development as an individual sale's bull group.

With our programs, we aim to cull back to about 25 bull weaners per year. The remainder of the bull calves are steered and either sold as weaned steer calves or, depending on the season, can be grown out to 12-15 months of age and then onsold.

Lee & Amanda O'Neill

Last updated 5 Nov 2007