Those in the beef business play the long game. Incremental genetic gains can take generations to translate into faster growing calves, higher carcase weights or better-tasting steaks.
Fortunately, Steve Skinner – who this week officially retires from Chief Operating Officer of UNE’s respected Agricultural Business Research Institute (ABRI) – is a patient man. Like the producers he has collaborated with for 30 years, he understands that it can take years to reap the rewards of decisions made today.
“It all stems back to the breeding,” he says. “We are after an animal that has certain attributes and that can pass those genes on to its progeny. Genetic selection is permanent and cumulative; the gains stay within the herd and are there forever.”
Steve has been something of an ABRI fixture himself since 1993, when he started as a processor of the world-leading BREEDPLAN software that has revolutionised genetic selection in beef cattle. Developed by UNE’s Animal Genetics and Breeding Unit (AGBU), the genetic evaluation system is one of several products licensed and promoted by ABRI to hundreds of breed societies, pastoral companies and individual producers internationally.
“I have seen the software develop, new breeds come in, new traits included, and the genetic gain that breeders have achieved using BREEDPLAN, and the majority of it has been very positive,” Steve says. “I have always been very proud of working for ABRI, that it’s a UNE entity and that I was a UNE graduate. I am proud of my heritage.”
“I have always been very proud of working for ABRI, that it’s a UNE entity and that I was a UNE graduate. I am proud of my heritage.”
His Bachelor of Agricultural Economics, Steve says, gave him “a very good grounding” after a rural upbringing on the CSIRO research station Chiswick, where his father worked as a stockman.
Steve with his mother Ella, who graduated with a Bachelor of Arts at the same time as Steve did, in 1981.
“I loved it at UNE; study was challenging and interesting. I majored in econometrics, which is quantitative economics, with lots of modelling and numbers, and ended up working for the then Bureau of Agricultural Economics in Canberra for seven years.”
But Steve was “not a public servant” and would spend the next five years being educated on the commercial realities of agribusiness, managing family sheep/wool and cattle operations in the New England.
“It was useful at the practical but also the personal level,” he says. “Managing a property, you have the stress of worrying about the financials, markets and weather conditions. It helped me to empathise and relate to the ABRI clients I went on to deal with. I could totally understand where they were coming from.”
At ABRI, there were also strong parallels between the quantitative economics he had learnt at UNE and the quantitative genetics of the BREEDPLAN program. And technology was advancing rapidly.
“Our commercialisation of the software to breed societies grew quickly, around Australia and around the world,” Steve says. “We also developed PC software for on-farm use and delivered extension services, to help our clients utilise the technology in their businesses, and even diversified into delivering a herd recording service for Queensland and NSW dairy producers.”
Steve held several managerial positions overseeing the delivery of ABRI products and services, before being promoted to Chief Operating Officer in 2015. He was also Manager of the International Beef Recording Scheme and spent eight years as Executive Officer of the Australian Registered Cattle Breeder’s Association (ARCBA), the peak body for the Australian beef cattle seedstock industry.
During Steve’s ABRI tenure, BREEDPLAN has transformed beef cattle herds, leading to significant improvements in the selection and breeding of animals and, ultimately, more profitable beef production. It now serves 40 breeds across 14 countries, and ABRI employs almost 70 staff, many of whom Steve mentored. Countless more in the Australian cattle breeding industry turned out to acknowledge and applaud Steve’s contributions at Beef Australia, in Rockhampton in early May, when he was awarded the ARCBA R.W. Vincent Award.
But accepting personal awards is somewhat counter to his own DNA. “I have been fortunate to have worked in strong teams, and it’s the team effort that gets people through,” Steve says.
