Stock & Land Beef Week is an 'opportunity' for this stud to sell bulls

After a lot of success with their Red Poll stud, Annette Walker and Noel Gnaden, Warragul, saw it as a natural transition to their Red Angus stud, Raedean, which has been growing stronger and stronger since 2007.

Ms Walker and Mr Gnaden turned to Red Angus due to its improved marketability and now run the 30-breeder stud alongside their 10-year-old granddaughter Georgia Van Rysbergen, who has a 10-breeder stud of her own.

Happy with the developments Raedean Red Angus has made since the first calves hit the ground in 2008, Ms Walker said they were looking forward to showcasing their stock at Stock & Land Beef Week.

"Beef Week is an important marketing tool for us," she said.

"We're probably not big enough to have a sale day just on our own so Beef Week is a good opportunity to not only display our stock, but also sell them too.

"It is a great opportunity for prospective buyers to come out and see our stock in the paddock.

"We also have many repeat buyers who purchase our bulls and females."

She said making the move to Red Angus made sense.

"We just found they were a lot easier to sell," she said.

"The Red Polls were fantastic, but we found the market for them was very small.

"It was purely a business decision to change over."

She said Raedean went with the Red Angus breed due to the quality of its traits.

"We wanted another breed that had the fantastic milking ability and could finish calves off, and the Red Angus attracted us," she said.

"There were a lot of similarities in the setup, and the economic traits are so important to us.

"So it was a pretty easy decision for us to actually start buying a few Red Angus and just seeing how they performed.

"We were happy and we ended up totally swapping over.

"We really love the fact that the Red Angus are so low maintenance and easy to handle.

"We don't like high-maintenance cattle, so we really love them.

"They're also able to finish calves off with minimal feeding.

"They have good udders and good feet.

"But the most important thing for us is temperament.

"We've had our granddaughter working with us since she was in a pram so we had to have cattle that are good with her around.

"They must have that beautiful nature, and anything that doesn't won't stay in our place."

Ms Walker said while they were happy with the stock they were producing, Raedean was always looking to improve the herd by using embryo transfer.