We are the oldest pedigree-registered shorthorn herd in Australia. Purebred cattle make up at least 80% of our sales and we sell around 150 bulls a year. Some families started buying from us in 1947, so we’re dealing with their third generation of buyers.

We breed around 1,300 breeding females a year – Shorthorns, some Santa Gertrudais and a composite breed of these we developed called the Durham Tropical.

The area where we live is a tropical, dry-heat type climate where Bos Indicus-type cattle thrive.

We have developed an 82% Shorthorn animal that’s virtually Bos Tauraus, with the characteristics of a Bos Indicus animal. This breed can handle the heat better, walk long distances to water, has fertility records similar to British breeds and we’ve increased the marbling score for the meat.

We won the beef Australia carcase competition in 2015, and that animal was a Durham Tropical. I don’t believe in breeding something without a goal at the other end. We’ve been focusing on the end product for probably 20 years now and improving the eating quality of the meat.

Showing has been a big influence on our business. Rather than following the show line of one person’s opinion as a judge, we’ve used a lot of trials within Australia to trial our cattle and to benchmark our breeding programme.

We’ve seen returns skyrocket to where now the Shorthorn breed has won every major carcase competition in the last three years.

When we first started entering carcase competitions, the European cattle were killing us, and it was because of their butt shape. However, we’ve been able to prove that butt shape isn’t the only measure of yield.

We’ve put a lot more meat on top, where the good cuts are. So, instead of breeding corned beef we’re breeding T-bone and fillet steaks. Right now, we’re in the middle of breeding season. We just put 800 cows through and single-sire mated the whole lot, which was a job in itself. It was really something to see; we’d normally do it in about three weeks but this year we put them all through in a week.

We live in a big cropping area so everyone is getting itchy feet. Since May we’ve probably had our best season of the last 10 years. Our weather pattern gives us about 23in of rain a year. Our harvest of wheat, barley chickpeas and fava beans are about to come off.

Cattle prices are at the highest we’ve ever seen, so it’s time to make hay while the sun shines.