More Jersey genetics – it makes sense in today’s farming environment

In their second year as herd owning sharemilkers, Ben and Allie King, have had another successful season with their Jersey cross herd in North Canterbury.  Ben and Allie have a passion for quality genetics and making their farm business as efficient and profitable as possible.

This season they milked 590 cows and plan to lift numbers to 660 with 65% Jersey genetics (J14-J16).  The remaining 35% of the milking herd will be a Jersey dominant cross breed cow with 76% Jersey in their replacement stock.

Ben and Allie’s first two seasons have been on a 171-hectare dairy unit purchased by the farm owners at the start of the contract term. The farm needed substantial re-grassing and thistle and weed control along with some modernisation. In the first season the milking shed was upgraded from a 36 to a 48 aside herring bone with a new in shed feed system.  Nineteen hectares of fixed grid irrigation was built alongside the existing three irrigation pivots, this meant there was no longer any labour-intensive irrigation which was a benefit to Ben and Allie’s business.

Ben and Allie have been farming for 9 seasons, Ben having started as a Dairy Assistant who always had a passion for genetics and a sweet spot for the Jersey breed.  It wasn’t until they went sharemilking and purchased their own herd, they had the opportunity to prove the financial gains made by utilising Jersey genetics and good management.

“Some landowners can be reluctant to allow share milkers to purchase Jersey herds, our farm owners also own the farm next door and have Holstein Friesian cows that tower over our herd. We were initially worried they wouldn’t be on board with our Jerseys, but they didn’t mind. We told them the milk solids our animals would produce in a System 3, and the BW and PW of the herd and they were happy.”

“When we looked at buying our herd, we wanted to purchase top quality, high BW and PW animals and put an emphasis on breeding to how we wanted them. They are our biggest asset and ensuring they are top quality, produce big milk and profitable calves was important to our business model. Some starting out in farming purchase budget animals and don’t have knowledge around breeding and genetics, I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong, by not purchasing quality animals to begin with.”

Ben and Allie DNA profile their herd and have a complete picture for breeding by herd testing and weighing. They use several different New Zealand breeding companies and also import semen and embryos from overseas.  Their breeding focus is on udders which stand up to their Canterbury farm’s production system, high fertility, conformation and capacity.

“Many farmers around us don’t believe our Jersey cows can do the production demanded from a Canterbury system, but they do, and they are more efficient and profitable at the same time”.

“The farms previous production record was 239,000 kg MS, in our first year we did 318,450 kg MS and in year two we did 317,500 kg MS with less cows and a stocking rate of 3.46.  The average liveweight of our herd is 480 kg doing 115% kg MS per kg LWT.”

Running a system 3 and ensuring cows are in good condition, fed and managed well allowed Ben and Allie to get record results in their first two seasons.

“Our herd did an average of 552 kg MS per cow whilst maintaining their fertility with an 81% 6 week in calf rate.  These results won us the Dairy Reproduction Excellence Award for highest 6 week in calf rate with our vet practice.  We’re very proud of our more efficient Jersey and Jersey cross girls.”

Ben and Allie believe the misconception with Jersey cows is they are smaller animals and produce less milk. Ben and Allie have proven with good genetics, Jersey cows can do high production, provide a high BW, high fertility, and low vet costs option with less mating intervention, less lameness, less heat stress, less calving issues and exceptional efficiency suited to today’s farming environment i.e. lower emissions intensity.

“The beauty of New Zealand’s dairy payout is it’s not competitive, anyone can adopt a similar farming and breeding strategy and do well.  It would be great to see more farmers increasing Jersey genetics in their herds, it makes a lot of sense in today’s farming environment”

Ben and Allies herd is in the top 2% for BW and top 1% for PW, which along with their 6 week in calf rate, allowed them to make higher financial gains by selling high value excess replacement stock, reduce non-replacement (NR) calves and use less beef semen.

“We can reduce beef straws used, which in turn lowers our NR numbers, high BW replacement heifers fetch a higher price than dairy beef calves at 4 days old, some dairy beef end up as bobby’s if Rearers don’t want them. We can use more high BW semen to get higher financial gains and less beef in our herd and less NR calves.”

“Because we get good in calf rates with AI we rear an excess of high quality replacement heifers and sell them then animals which are in calf to beef are reared and sold, we are this year introducing jersey bulls as we have a buyer and are doing 100-ish high BW Jersey bulls to rear for sale and the rest are non-replacement calves.”

“We are dairy farmers first and we’ve got to optimise the milking herd for efficiency and profitability, once we’ve done that, we can focus on NR calves and the best dairy beef bulls to put over the cows we don’t want to breed from. These we sell as Jersey bulls or as dairy beef.”

“Until now we haven’t had any in-shed automation, which has been a learning curve for us, as so many farms in Canterbury do. We haven’t had an automatic drafting system or wearables. We’ve relied on our management practices and our team being attentive and our cows being the best they can by breeding efficient, fertile high milk solid producers.”

Going into their third season the farm has installed Protrack© drafting and Ben and Allie are taking the opportunity to introduce collars.

“We are data driven people, we thrive on seeing results and we’re hoping that relying on technology will allow us and our team to have an even more in depth understanding of our cows, whilst at the same time automating and streamlining, freeing up time from manual heat detection and drafting. We know our cows can do the business, now we can see if the technology can maintain that”.