Willack Poll Herefords
History
The Willack herd of Bill and Annie Lack is now in it its 45th year of breeding registered Poll Herefords.
Bill has been involved with Poll Herefords for nearly 60 years, commencing his interest as a five year old when his father commenced the Cromer Park Stud at Wangaratta. He has memories of the country show circuit in the sixties and of helping his father selecting stud females out of Western Victoria as an eight year old to go with an Ardno bull selected at the Sydney Royal
Show.
As a 10 year old he was given his first cow by his grandfather for helping to check the cattle and giving them salt on Mount Hotham. In 1976 he bought his first lot of stud heifers to commence his own Willack Poll Hereford stud. This was run in conjunction with his father’s herd until moving his herd on the purchase of the current property at Dawson (near Heyfield) in 1990.
Breeding
More females were added including some from River Perry. Another 10 heifers were added from Cromer Park on the passing of Bill’s father in 2008 and another 9 were purchased at the 2014 dispersal of the Cromer Park stud. A cow with a bull calf at foot was also selected from the Chester Dispersal in 2017.
Calves born at Willack are the results of the AI program that has been implemented over the last thirteen years in the herd using bulls that have been prize winners and top sellers at the Dubbo or Wodonga National sales and more recently meet certain performance criteria determined by our breeding philosophy.
Sires
Sires selected have included leading Australian sires, Rilo Park G-Force B6, Allendale Washington C77, Kidman Formation D142, Allendale Anzac E114, River Perry Fergus, Days Brigadier G101, Valma Honkey Tonk, Yarrandabbie Jingle, Days Fahrenheit, Wirruna Leap Forward, Allendale Heidelberg M061, Wirruna Matty, Wirruna Nolan, Injemira Techno N276, as well as WLB Global and McCoy Absolute from Canada.
AI Program
In 2021, Wirruna Papa and Churchill Broadway have been added to the program. Natural matings as a follow up to the AI program have usually been selected from our home bred bulls with exception being 2015,when the top priced yearling bull was purchased at the Mount Difficult Dispersal near the Grampians to be used as a follow up bull to the AI program. This bull
had extremely good Breedplan figures with all indexes in top 1% for the breed and was used for the one season before selling to the Tarwin stud. Chester Kahuna N062 has been used in recent years after being purchased with his mother.
All bulls are fertility tested, scanned for carcass traits and have had DNA samples genomically tested for polledness and known genetic disorders through Herefords Australia as well as having complete Breedplan figures available from ABRI. Willack has a four and a half star rating with Breedplan.
Bill feels that the selection of females over the years has given him a good base to work with as only the best were retained during the run of dry years where numbers were halved and only those females that could endure the conditions were retained.