CLEAR CREEK PASTORAL CO
Founder

Andrew Freshwater

Director of Clear Creek Pastoral Co and CEO of Moorella Ag Holdings · Byawatha, North East Victoria · MAIAST, CPAg

Andrew Freshwater is the seventh generation of his family to breed livestock, and at Clear Creek, Byawatha, in North East Victoria he and Angela Murphy run Angus and Red Angus cattle together with the Advancer composite and the Catalyst shedding sheep flock, while Moorella Ag Holdings Pty Ltd, where he's CEO, runs cattle and sheep on properties across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.

He's spent his working life breeding stock and building the tools to measure and select them, which started when he was exporting sheep genetics to nine countries by nineteen, including live rams that went to southern South America while he was still in Year 12, and has since led him to import the Leachman Stabilizer cattle into Australia, help set up a cattle breeding system on the Kazakh steppe, build a sheep genetics supply chain and recording system for Sweden's largest food company and work with an overseas government and university group on a tropically adapted cattle composite.

Andrew is a director of Clear Creek Pastoral Co, holds MAIAST and CPAg accreditation and publishes the Clear Creek Newsletter, and he's written the software behind Genemap, TheFarmOS, PaddockOS and the Clear Creek tools because he wanted commercial producers to have evaluation and management systems built around what actually makes them money, which comes down to fertility, body condition, structure, docility and adaptation to the country they're running on.

He believes the future of sheep and cattle breeding lies in climatically adapted composite breeds that are measured properly in commercial conditions rather than judged in a show ring, and he's backed that by taking the phenotypes in his own dataset himself, on his own livestock, and writing the evaluation software that analyses them.

Clear Creek and why it runs the way it does

Clear Creek Pastoral Co is where those ideas get tested on his own stock, so instead of running as a traditional stud the business is set up more like a genetics company that happens to farm, with the Angus and Red Angus cattle recorded and genomically tested, the Advancer composite bred to hang onto the heterosis most beef producers leave on the table, and the Catalyst sheep run on an accelerated lambing system adapted from Cornell STAR for five lambings in three years, a year-round lamb supply and no shearing. The platform tools and the newsletter grew out of needing proper numbers behind those breeding and trading decisions, and the selection pressure stays on commercial traits like out-of-season fertility, where a ewe that won't cycle out of season doesn't get to stay in the flock.

Other work by Andrew Freshwater

Writing