Longreach Stud History

The original land of 600 acres was taken up in 1824 by an Englishman who chose the good basalt country rising above the ‘long reach’ of the river, and that is where our stud cattle graze for maximum benefit today. When our family acquired ‘Longreach” in 1903, it gradually expanded to 4,000 acres (1,620 hectares) and today commercial cattle and Merino sheep run in conjunction with the stud.

Bill Tooth, a real sheep and cattle enthusiast, a life long resident of “Longreach” and co-founder of Longreach Limousins, sadly passed away in December 2010. His legacy lives on, however, as we continue to focus on breeding the best functional beef cattle and wool sheep in his memory.

We established our stud in 1986, having admired with growing enthusiasm the muscling and potential of the breed. By the early 1990’s we had acquired females from the most prominent studs of the time.

We used French sires without exception for some years. which resulted in a line of excellent females with depth, muscle, strong spine and milk. Our first resident French bull was Daget, who left an even stamp on those early progeny. We chose AI sires from France.

Our most outstanding step away from French sires came with Wulf’s Choice, then Double Agent and others, a combination of which blended well with our powerful females. From that time on we have endeavoured to maintain a balance of muscle with softness, milk, growth and fertility. More recently, with the focus so much on polled Limousin, this has increased the challenge. The challenge is real – polled genes invariably lose muscle and compromise confirmation.

We have raised the bar on docility within our herd over the past ten years. From birth onwards, our cattle are appraised constantly for attitude and ease of handling. We manage the docility EBV tirelessly and only retain those animals with a low figure if they have consistently proved it wrong.

We took many years to show enthusiasm for exhibiting cattle. In spite if this, we can now look back on a succession of steady show achievements from 2005 to the present day. In addition to the champions we have bred, we feel we are on track when a show team earns awards across the board.

No doubt, our highest accolade has been winning Supreme Beef Exhibit and Champion of Champions (Interbereed) twice at Canberra Royal, in 2010 and in 2013 with our bulls “Longreach Contestabull” and “Longreach Grandiose”.