Clear Creek Soil Test
Founder

Andrew Freshwater

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

Andrew Freshwater is a seventh-generation livestock producer at Clear Creek, Byawatha, in North East Victoria, running Angus and Red Angus cattle, the Advancer composite and the Catalyst shedding sheep flock there with Angela Murphy, and he's CEO of Moorella Ag Holdings Pty Ltd, which runs cattle and sheep on properties across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.

His working life has gone into breeding livestock and building ways to measure and select them, beginning when he was exporting sheep genetics to nine countries by nineteen and had live rams on their way to southern South America while he was still in Year 12, and carrying on through importing the Leachman Stabilizer cattle into Australia, helping set up a cattle breeding system on the Kazakh steppe, building a sheep genetics supply chain and recording system for Sweden's largest food company and working with an overseas government and university group on a tropically adapted cattle composite.

Along with being a director of Clear Creek Pastoral Co, Andrew holds MAIAST and CPAg accreditation and publishes the Clear Creek Newsletter, and he built the software behind Genemap, TheFarmOS, PaddockOS and the Clear Creek tools so commercial producers would have evaluation and management systems built around the traits that actually earn them money, being fertility, body condition, structure, docility and adaptation to their own country.

He sees the future of sheep and cattle breeding in climatically adapted composite breeds measured properly in commercial conditions, and he's put that into practice by taking the phenotypes in his own dataset himself on his own livestock and writing the evaluation software that analyses them.

Why he built the soil test tool

The soil test tool is one of the Clear Creek tools, and it's there because a lab report on its own doesn't tell you whether spending money on a paddock is going to pay. It reads the test against the paddock's own phosphorus buffering index to set the critical Colwell P for pasture or for crops like wheat, barley, canola and oats, checks potassium, sulphur and acidity, and then works out whether the fertiliser or lime you're weighing up is worth it, with local climate used only to bound the financial upside and never to change the chemistry, and quite often the honest answer is that the paddock's already at target and the money's better kept in the bank, which is the same question he took up in his Beef Central pieces on the cost of doing nothing and the cost of doing something.

Other work by Andrew Freshwater

Writing