Grenville’s Bart McCulloch keen to Excel after long haul to the Gold Coast
Tasmanian breeder Bart McCulloch has good grounds to be confident his ambitious mission to the Magic Millions sale will go better than his previous bold venture from the Island State to Queensland.
Grenville Stud, the progressive 1100-acre farm south-west of Launceston which runs some 40 broodmares and stands young stallions Stratosphere (Snitzel) and Zululand (Fastnet Rock), is making a play involving some serious investments in time, distance and money in sending a “draft” of just one horse to the auction.
Going under the hammer around lunchtime Wednesday, having sailed across Bass Strait then floated overland for two days to reach the Gold Coast, will be Lot 264, a filly by Exceed And Excel (Danehill) who’s the first foal out of Pierro (Lonhro) mare Miss Chierro.
The youngster is a well-built type with the right physicals to do well. That’s what they also said about Bart too though, when he went to Queensland for his tilt at the big time.
The son of breeder, trainer and Grenville co-operator Graeme, Bart – who is indeed named after the Bart – is living life to its full in what’s actually his second sporting career. He was a promising Australian Rules footballer – so promising he was signed, as draft pick No. 69, by the Brisbane Lions in 2008.
The young South Launceston ruck/half-forward headed way north as a late teenager with lots of hope, and scope (his height was good for footy, though it can affect the optical illusion of making his horses look small). He joined a club which had a few years earlier sealed a claim to historical greatness with three successive flags. Unfortunately for McCulloch, though, things didn’t go according to plan.
A horror run of injuries dogged his time with the Lions. He battled back, only to suffer again, and was restricted to just 20 lower grade games in three years till a recurring quadriceps tear finally ended his dream.
“Oh look, it is what it is,” McCulloch told ANZ Bloodstock News as he watched his impressive filly strut for potential buyers.
“It was a bit disappointing with the injuries, but at least I did have a crack at it. To be honest, when it all ended it was a bit of a relief, and not all this frustration at trying to get right all the time.”
McCulloch went home. Once mentally and physically over his time with the Lions, he went back to football with South Launceston. Now 31, he still plays for them each winter, which he calls a great weekly palate-cleanser from farm life.
“What’s annoying is I hadn’t had the chance at AFL when I was playing my best footy, at 23 or 24,” he says. “But being in the AFL was a great experience. It didn’t work out, but footy was never going to be forever anyway. Besides, I enjoy what I do now.”
Fortunately for McCulloch, there was an invigorating plan B. Under the father-son team, the 40-year-old Grenville operation – started by Graeme as a show-jumping concern – has become a dynamic entity lately, thumbing its nose at Tasmania’s remoteness and bucking a modern-era decline in breeding there to punch above its weight at sales either side of Bass Strait.
The Tasmanian broodmare band has declined sharply in recent years, from more than 600 to “probably less than half that now”, McCulloch estimates, reasoning sales results in the state until the past few years had made the business uneconomical for most. With many breeders calling time, there are two main players now: Grenville and Armidale, a neighbour ten kilometres down the Meander Valley, a rival, but also a comrade in the battle to promote the state’s thoroughbreds.
“We’re both Tasmanian studs. We want to see each other do well and push the Tasmanian product,” the laid-back, affable McCulloch said. “The stats have been fantastic from the Tassie sale. Return on investment has outshone every other sale by some way in the last five or six years.
“When any Tasmanian horse does well it shows Tasmanians can produce really good horses, so to see horses like Mystic Journey and Still A Star do well – whenever anyone breeds a good horse in Tassie, it’s great to see.”
Grenville’s affirming successes recently have included breeding Triple Group 1-winner Mongolian Khan (Holy Roman Emperor) and Tasmania’s new boom horse Turk Warrior (Outreach), while another product, Celavi (Fighting Sun), won a Singapore stakes race recently. Last year they set a personal best by selling a Deep Field (Northern Meteor) colt for $550,000 to Craig Rounsefell and the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
They’ll have a busy sales season, with 23 yearlings to be offered in Tasmania, two in Melbourne and three in Adelaide, and are hoping this week’s plucky lone warrior, Lot 264, will prove a strong advertisement not just for their farm but Tasmanian thoroughbreds.
Grenville knows much is riding on the sale of this “project” yearling. They paid $175,000 for the dam – placed in the bush from two starts. Her mother Chickens (Danehill) was a listed winner from four runs, who’s thrown five winners from nine including Sydney Group 3 victor Do You Think (Starcraft).
They then paid the $132,000 service fee for Exceed And Excel, completing – among other enticements – a gender-balanced 2×3 cross to Danehill (as was carried by quadruple Group 1 winner Guelph, among others).
“It’s a long way to come for one horse,” said McCulloch, who’ll be on the Coast ten days for this one, August-born yearling.
“But we thought, she’s by Exceed And Excel, she’s a really nice, good moving filly and an early type, so she suits this sale. We think she’ll be quite an early two-year-old.
“We wanted to give the mare a real chance from early on. We haven’t been to many stallions in Exceed And Excel’s price range, but we will try to reinvest each year and improve the quality of our mares.
“Top stallions aren’t cheap, but there’s a reason for that and we think for what he’s done, Exceed And Excel is still value at his service fee. He leaves great racehorses, and hopefully we’ll be rewarded later this week.”
McCulloch concedes there are downsides to membership of the tiny minority that is the Tasmanian thoroughbred industry. But he insists they’re starkly outweighed by the pros.
“We’ve got great rainfall, and really fertile land,” said McCulloch, whose neighbours grow peas, beans and potatoes. “I guess you could compare it to New Zealand, with the rainfall and a cooler climate. The horses put down really good bone and we produce sound, tough racehorses.
“We don’t get dry like they do in the Hunter, so we have lots of natural feed and we’re not handfeeding as much as they have to, which stands horses in good stead for later in life. Plus the lack of dust is good for breathing and lungs and respiratory. And it’s just a very clean environment where we get very few illnesses with our foals and young stock.
“Logistically, yes we’re a bit further away. There’s the boat trip on the Spirit Of Tasmania, which is eight or ten hours, but really, so long as it’s not rough seas, it’s a lot less tough on a horse than spending that time in a truck on the road.
“In an ideal world we’d love to walk our mares onto studs. Sending them to the mainland takes things out of your control a bit,” said McCulloch, whose farm shipped 12 mares across Bass Strait last year.
“But our production costs are down. We’re not hand-feeding or supplementing as much as you’d need on the mainland, and we’ve invested well in irrigation and water on the property, so even if the weather’s dry we’ll still have green grass.
“It’s a great place to breed horses and with the investments we’ve been making, we’re confident we’ll continue to breed better and better horses.”