The Chevredor story is a classic “rags to riches” tale that is a testament to determination, hard work and the value of good friends.

Laurie and I both have a varied work history that includes business management and marketing as well as breeding and livestock management with sheep and cattle that goes back to the ‘70s in Mudgee on the family farm. Haddon Rig in western NSW has stayed in mind from that time as the model of how a stud should be set up. Laurie’s experience of goats goes back even further, to hunting feral in the 60’s! Just prior to purchasing our property we had our own furniture shop and removalist business in Bowen in North Queensland. Although the business was doing very well, a family emergency in 1997 forced us to sell the business to take on the care of my handicapped sister. The sale gave us just enough funds to purchase the property that is now Chevredor.

At that time it was a 1250 acre, heavily timbered block with a “sort of” boundary on two sides (that at least delineated where the fence should be!), a small cottage and even smaller shed. Although we owned it outright we had no working capital so the following three years slipped by in a blur of cutting, barking and planting fence posts and stringing wire as funds became available. By the beginning of the new decade we had a boundary fence, a couple of smaller paddocks, a bigger shed and a pretty fair idea of what the land type and climate would allow us to do. The country seemed to lend itself to raising ants or goannas but these were associated with some serious management and marketing issues. The small herd of crossbred goats that we had introduced to clean up under the timber seemed to manage the conditions much better than the cattle and horses so we sold off the cattle, found good homes for the horses and threw our lot in with the goats.

This bold decision coincided with the beginning of the worst drought in 100 years when even crossbred goats needed serious feed supplementation to survive and reproduce. Prices were not too good for crossbred wethers at the time and just barely met the feed costs of our growing herd. It was time for another bold decision, so we sold our commercial herd and replaced them with just 20 registered full blood Boer does and one buck. The animals were descendants of the original goats brought into Australia. They were huge compared to our 1X does and we loved them. We joined the BGBAA and searched continually for “goat specific” management, health and nutrition information to fine tune our existing knowledge of livestock to a goat frequency. We read Boer Briefs from cover to cover every time it came out and marvelled over the centrefold photos of goats that did not appear to be the same species as ours. These had short thick legs, wide chests and rear ends that looked more like beef cattle than goats; they were truly a “meat goat”. The text with the photos referred to “new genetics”, a term we hadn’t heard before. (There is still a great deal of debate in the industry about the validity of “new” versus “old” genetics but the difference was, and still is, patently obvious to us.) We still loved our girls but began to see the faults in their large but narrow frames, long but thin legs and rather plain heads.

It was time to make a decision with the head not the heart, and we sold our “old bloodline” does and purchased a selection of Mericol does, and two, Big Bucks, bucks one of which was Jo Dirt, with a $10,000 price tag. Although almost everyone told us we were crazy, firstly for spending that much money and secondly for dealing with Big Bucks; Jo Dirt and the Mericol does were our first real step towards the herd we have today. We have probably made ten times Jo’s price from the sale of offspring, semen and embryos and he is either the sire, or grandsire, of most of the animals on our show team today. Soon after our move to “new” genetics we began to win ribbons at major shows, just one or two at first, then gradually more, culminating at the 2005 Brisbane Royal where Chevredor won all the broad ribbons in the standard classes, and the Hoof and Hook! Chevredor is about more than just showing and we took greater pleasure from the fact that all but one of the champions was home grown. At the same time as we were building up the quality of our stock we developed a website www.chevredor.net , registered with Austrade, built an embryo transplant surgery, had a couple of ET programs and made a heap of friends who have worked and shown alongside us through thick and thin ever since. When the embryo surgery and shed complex burned down and through inadequate insurance, we lost over $100,000 in six minutes, we felt like giving it all away.

Our family and friends, each in their own way, turned up to help clear away the debris and get us up and running again. With their help and encouragement, a major set back was turned into a positive.

The property, yards and sheds were totally redesigned and are now the Chevredor Pre-Export Quarantine Facility which is licensed with AQIS and is currently handling regular shipments of goats to Malaysia and the Philippines from breeders all over Queensland and NSW. The centre has been so successful that barely three months after it was officially opened, the Chevredor Quarantine Facility was nominated for the Premier’s Export Awards and was a finalist in the Southern Queensland section. In our spare time (when it gets dark!), we developed and researched “Traces”, a free goat industry newsletter. This newsletter contains all sorts of information on nutrition, health, management and markets that has been either researched (or experienced) by us, or sent in by other breeders or industry specialists and we feel that it has played a role in encouraging communication and information sharing between breeders. Initially circulated to Queensland breeders, Traces is now available online through our website to anyone and we hope this will increase the flow of information between breeders all over Australia.

2006 looks like being a bumper year. Our younger son, Brett, has returned to the property with his wife Sally to help manage this rapidly growing enterprise. We have purchased a truck to facilitate the movement of goats to and from the centre but it will also be available for outside orders and to assist breeders who enjoy showing but are unable to transport their animals to the more distant shows. Orders are currently in hand for embryos to Brazil and goats to Malaysia and the Philippines and enquiries from new buyers are streaming in. The new artificial breeding centre has come on line and carries semen and embryos from a very wide variety of quality bloodlines. Goats can be served by our standing sires, AI’d or laproscopically inseminated* with frozen semen and, as the centre now boasts a “real-time” ultra-sound pregnancy tester, they can be pregnancy tested before returning home if required. We often include does belonging to other breeders in our embryo programs, with donor and recipient does prepared, programmed, implanted and now pregnancy tested before returning home.

Chevredor’s new quality assurance program comes fully into effect this year:

• All Chevredor’s stud stock have been “stud classified” by Jackie Jordaan.
• We will replace tattooing on all stud stock with registered micro-chip ID
• All stud stock will have registered DNA profiles.

It has been a long, hard haul spanning nine years, but we are happy with where we are and very excited about where we are going. It is a vibrant and challenging industry and we are here to stay!