YOU’VE got your Charolais, Limousin (red and black) and Maine Anjou. Plus Salers and blonde d’Aquitaines. Or it might be French Simmental, or have you tinkered with the Tarentaise?
As they say in rural France: ce sont tous des bovins Français qui ont fait leur marque dans l’industrie bovine australienne.
Absolutely, they are all French cattle that have made their mark Down Under.
But the breed a determined group of producers is hoping will one day be spoken of in the same sentence as the above, more established, varieties is the bazadais (bazadaise in French). The bazzers, as they have been colloquially named by their Australian advocates.
If it helps pinpoint this quasi double-muscled goliath any better, the bazzer is named for the commune of Bazas in the Gironde department of the Nouvelle Aquitaine region in south-west France.
Or you can ignore that and head for Kerang.
There, Darren Gurnett and Michelle Sutcliff (along with their 11-year-old son Harrison) have a most remarkable collection of beef cattle, sheep, poultry and porkers, all juggled by this little stud with big plans.
These plans include taking this long-established grey breed and turning them black (and that’s after Australian breeders have converted them from horned to polled) and add a little fat.
The bazadais herd book was opened in 1896, although they had been around long before then.
Darren says that will be the key to making Australian producers and processors sit up and take notice of his cattle after his extensive research showed the bazzer was born to perform well in the antipodes.
“Black cattle always sell for more,” Darren says.
“The true driver of the agricultural industry is market demand. If you look at any saleyard right now, anything black is making extra dollars.”
To a large extent, he also believes creating the polled bazadais was about making life easier for farmers.
“Everyone wants polled, no one wants horned. It’s the way the industry is going and soon you won’t be able to de-horn without needing a large array of medical equipment,” Darren says.
And adding that little bit of fat? Well that’s a hook for Australia’s butchers.
“I was talking to one of them at the Seymour (Alternative Farming) Expo recently and he said bazadais was one of his favourite meats to work with,” Darren says. “It’s an incredibly lean, high-quality meat.
“In fact, he told me, the only thing which is still holding it back is the fact the fat was so thin, the carcases were getting freezer burn in the cold stores.”
Darren says these days consumers are looking for a fattier product, compared to the old days where lean meat was the “in” thing.
Darren and Michelle run their stud, Gunyado, where they’ve already introduced pure-blood polled genetics (Gunyado is the name of a street where the family previously lived).
“The EMD (eye muscle depth) on these guys is already huge,” Michelle says of the bazadais.
“They have a doubled muscle look, but they are really only highly muscled, which means they don’t have the problems that come with double muscling.”
Now the plan is to use 20 angus stud cows to produce a line of fattier, totally polled, black bazadais.
And not just any angus. Darren managed to get his hands on a small line of elite Te Mania angus females from an enterprise going out of business for retirement and he “jumped at the opportunity to grow females of this calibre”.
He says the angus stud cows will introduce a solid black colour, good fat coverage and strong polled genetics, with the aim “to produce something true to type, black and polled”.
Darren says his genetic experiment “might take more than four years, because it’s about breeding the right article four times, not just four straight generations”.
When asked if he was nervous about the time he’d have to invest, the beef and sheep farmer simply brushed it off.
“I’ve bred poultry all my life. I get more satisfaction out of breeding a good animal than winning at shows.”
Darren says his Nutrien Ag agent was also convinced they’d have no trouble selling the first-cross black bulls as herd bulls.
He says commercial producers are looking for exactly the same thing as stud breeders – an animal with cutting-edge meat yield-to- bone ratios.
“The bazadais has a spectacular ratio in eye muscle area which will make it attractive to everyone,” Darren says.
That is discovered by scanning or processing as the breed is just taking its first step into the area of estimated breeding values, but Darren is confident the breed, and the hybrid vigour of its first-cross product, will have a dramatic impact in the marketplace, especially as more people embrace the genetics.
While he is pioneering work down the angus path, he points out the bazadais is already something of a first-cross regular in the Australian beef industry as first-crosses, particularly with bos indicus cattle, where it has been used over brahmans to produce an excellent carcase for farmers in drier climates.
As a former brahman breeder, Darren says he has got some inside running when it comes to mixing his small herd with the juggernaut that is the angus.
He already has half his stud’s 30-female nucleus in calf to angus genetics, so the proof will be on the ground shortly.
“I’ve already got a few blokes using them over a few different breeds, and one chap I know has used a bazadais bull over his Friesian-Hereford cross females and he has some of the best calves I have ever seen, they are rippers,” Darren says.
“The bazadais is not necessarily a low birth-weight female but their calves really hit the ground running and they fill out so quickly.
“I’ve had them at three and four weeks and they are bloody hard to hang on to.”
Unfortunately Darren finds his day-to-day work demanding at times, following a motorcycle accident three years, which left him with very limited use of his right arm.
This is where he says son Harrison has stepped up to become, literally, in many ways, his dad’s right arm.
“I find some of the physical challenges beyond me, but Harrison is a real cracker, he’ll have a go at anything, from shearing or anything else, he is such a goer and he makes my life so much easier,” Darren says.
“It’s a bit like Michelle. There is an old saying a farmer’s wife is his insurance – she constantly reminds me of that – and even though she works off-farm as a teacher, when she gets home she transforms into a farmer immediately.”
Michelle says the pure-blood bazadais genetics would always be preserved.
“Because we don’t know – none of us can know – in the future whether that full-blood stuff will be needed to pivot in another way,” she says.
“Fifty years ago in Australia, they would’ve said every sheep in Australia should be a merino – and look at that now.
“If other places hadn’t preserved their breeds, we wouldn’t have the ability to diversify like (the sheep industry) have done.”
The Kerang farmers, who also keep stud Tamworth pigs, have seen this loss of traditional genetics first-hand in the pig industry.
“The normal (Pig Improvement Company) pig can’t go out in the sun because they get sunburnt now and they can’t handle the heat or cold,” Darren says.
“Compare that to an old-style Tamworth, which is a long-haired animal built for free-ranging.
“We’ve probably got two-thirds of the Tamworth pig genetics in Australia here on the farm. There aren’t many left because you can’t import pigs like other animals.”
The Kerang couple have been involved with bazadais cattle for six years.
Darren says after getting some bazadais in the paddock he was impressed by their performance.
“They’ve got that bone-to-muscle ratio and that’s where they run rings around the competition.
“There might be other breeds with more mass, but the money is in the muscle, not the bone.”
Michelle says the bazadais had stood out after they came across the breed on Facebook.
“When we first saw them, we did some research and really like their point of difference. They’re good mums, easy calving and fast growth.
“When I was researching the region they come from in France, the climate sounded similar to us. They have a dry period and get a frost with not much rain.”
The couple’s original plan was to use bazadais semen across their commercial cows, but with two of the last bazadais stud herd owners in Victoria scaling down their involvement, the Kerang farmers found themselves inheriting about 20 pure bazadais cows.
“Faye (Tuchtan) was getting out of it and she says I could come and have my pick,” Darren says.
“And Ros (Denney) was switching to bazadais and wagyu crosses for her paddock-to-plate business.”
The couple also acknowledged the role Queensland breeder Kahn Vietheer of Primeiro Bazadais had played in creating a polled bazadais product.
The Primeiro Bazadais stud is focused on creating homozygous polled pure bazadais cattle. And Kahn Vietheer is prepared to stand up and be counted for his position by sitting as the president of the Bazadais Society of Australia, with Darren his No.2 as vice- president.
They have helped keep the breed and its future going through the depths of the pandemic and lockdowns.
Darren says, after countless hours of phone calls, video calls and swapping genetics, it was still strange to think he and Kahn have never met in person.
