Last year we attended the very commercially relevant Royal Agriculture Sydney Beef Challenge Feeder Carcase Awards held at the Powerhouse Hotel, Tamworth NSW. With only heifers to enter this year’s 10th RAS Beef Challenge.
The 200th year of the Royal Sydney Show and our 8th Consecutive year of the Challenge, our Angus heifers performed extremely well in the performance and MSA eating quality awards of the competition.
After taking out 1st, 2nd and 3rd placings for Live assessment as well as having the highest Daily Weight Gains at the Field Day a few weeks ago, our purebred Angus heifers recorded the highest MARBLE score up to 7 (or MSA marble score of 970 pts) while the entire competition scored 0 or 1 for marbling (which correlates to MSA scores in the 300s) and to top it off we had a heifer (sired by Texas NASA) record the largest EMA of 103cm of the entire competition against crossbred steers with the added advantage of hybrid vigour!! This heifer pen recorded the 2nd highest EMA’s of the entire competition which we believe is incredible particularly when competing against high profile crossbred steers!
The highlight of the night was when we were awarded the rare RAS GOLD medal for Eating Quality which requires all 6 individuals (in our case heifers) scoring all over 62 points for MSA Index which is no easy feat. Our winning pen averaged an incredible MSA Index of 65.15 and up to 69.24 for an individual heifer which is MASSIVE!! It was our first RAS Gold medal and the RAS Beef Challenge rarely award these GOLD medals as to get all six head to score over 62 points for MSA Index is incredibly difficult, so you can imagine how excited we were to finally receive this highly prestigious award! Also our other 3 Export pens of heifers were all awarded Bronze medals for MSA Eating Qulaity. We regard this as a massive achievement and our emphasis on meat quality in our breeding program is really kicking goals! On top of these achievements we also took out the Reserve Champion Export Individual.
Congratulations to all other winners particularly Yulgibar Pastoral for their outstanding result taking all broad ribbons bar two. We were delighted that their Reserve Champion Export Pen of Santa/Angus steers had Texas Bloodlines.
Texas Angus Placings
100 Day Export
**RESERVE CHAMPION INDIVIDUAL
**GOLD MEDAL (Eating Quality) x 1
**BRONZE MEDAL (Eating Quality) x3
**Live Assessment Pen – 1st, 2nd 3rd
**Live Assessment Individ – 1st & 2nd
**MSA Eating Quality Pen & 1st & 2nd
**MSA Eating Quality Individ – 1st, 2nd & 3rd
**Carcase Grid Pen – 3rd
**Profitability Pen – 3rd
A special thank you to the RAS Cattle Committee, sponsors including our great agents BJA and Mike and Dannie MacCue for all their hard work at organising this incredible Feeder Carcase Trial. It is a wonderful benchmarking event for our herd and the feedback data is invaluable to us!