This is a subscriber-only article
Some farmers who had ordered sires at the start of the season are angry with LIC and ICBF now that New Zealand sires such as Sierra and Conrad have been pulled from the available Irish list for the 2017 breeding season.
In February, New Zealand breeding company Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC) stepped back from its initial proposal that farmers must sign contracts to protect LIC intellectual property. They did this by taking some top bulls that they had hoped to sell in Ireland in 2017 off the Irish market.
The LIC contract proposed prohibiting the sale of male progeny to other AI companies that might be used to compete with international sales in other countries. Specifically, this contract was for top New Zealand sires not yet available in New Zealand.
At the time, Irish industry sources claimed the LIC contract would potentially force other Irish AI organisations to also operate contracts and hence destroy the effectiveness of the Gene Ireland testing programme as operated by ICBF.
The claim by the Irish AI companies was that they operate individual cow contract matings where selected cows in herds around the country are contract-mated to a sire suggested by the AI company. Should a bull calf result, the AI company would have ‘‘first refusal’’ on the calf.
Further investigation on this topic by the Irish Farmers Journal reveals more widespread contracting of cows than might first have been expected. We estimate a breeding programme called ‘‘Keystone’’ operated by the National Cattle Breeding Centre (NCBC), which is owned by Progressive Genetics and Munster AI, has rolling contracts on close to 4,000 of the best Irish cows.
Other Irish AI partners such as Dovea AI also have contracted cows, so in total we understand up to 5,000 cows could be contracted to Irish AI companies.
This whole herd and individual contract mating undoubtedly upsets foreign breeding companies. Effectively, their best sires can be used on the best Irish cows generating high ebi bull calves that potentially can be used against them in New Zealand and other international markets. I understand a similar situation exists in New Zealand where the best cows are contracted to AI companies.
Keystone programme
This year, NCBC will collect the first bull calves from Keystone herds. If a farmer is part of the ‘‘Keystone’’ breeding programme, we understand this effectively contracts the whole herd to a breeding company for a rolling one-year contract. So how is this different to what LIC was proposing? Bernard Eivers, chief executive of the NCBC, said: “We have a total of 33 herds as part of our Keystone breeding programme.’
‘‘For the farmer in the programme, we genotype all the heifers in his/her herd each year. This is a big cost to us and for that we get first option on a bull calf once a male calf of interest to us has been genotyped. There is no restriction or compulsion on the farmer to sell to us. If we can’t strike a deal then there is nothing in the contract to say he/she can only sell to the NCBC. Eddie Barrett from Cork operates the programme on our behalf.”
So, what is the advantage of this breeding programme to NCBC? The advantage for NCBC is that young females coming through the system are identified that bit earlier in herds rather than waiting for the female to prove herself as she produces milk.
If NCBC secures a male calf, the calf is brought into the NCBC rearing system and grown, with semen collected and tested and the first 500 doses from that bull are used in the Gene Ireland progeny testing programme.
Eivers said: “We see that an unbiased, randomised test of a new sire where a farmer cannot pre-select sires and they have to use a team of sires on the herd.”
Is the Keystone approach similar to what LIC was proposing earlier this year? Not really. Eivers said: “We are imposing no restriction to sell the male calf to other parties compared with the LIC proposal, as I know it. The advantage to the Irish industry with our model is that when heifers are genotyped in our programme, their genotypes are used in training the reference population.”
When asked about the duration of the Keystone contracts, Eivers explained that it is a rolling annual contract and either side can opt out of as new information becomes available.
When I enquired about other individual cows that NCBC would also have contract-mated, he said between 500 to 600 cows would be contracted individually excluding the Keystone herds and from that usually 100 male calves are genotyped where again NCBC would have first refusal.
Male calf inflation
Interestingly, Eivers said there has been a staggering and dramatic inflation in the value of bull calves purchased by AI companies over the last five to 10 years. He said: “Where once we were paying €1,000 and €2,000 for a young bull calf, this has now reached up to €20,000 for the very best. At that stage, it is only a calf and you have lots of risks to overcome such as rearing the calf properly to keep him healthy, male fertility issues, not to mention how the bulls proof (ebi, etc) performs.” Eivers explained that for every 30 male calves purchased about five might make it to market, so effectively those five have to pay for the 30 calves purchased on day one.
Background
The background to this whole debate around contracts erupted when LIC proposed asking farmers to sign new legal contracts this spring, restricting potential usage of LIC-bred stock.
The contract would have precluded farmers selling LIC-bred animals to other AI companies for the purposes of producing semen for a period of five years. Irish industry sources said the development could have threatened the future of the Irish national breeding programme operated by ICBF.
This development comes following a long period where New Zealand-bred semen has been used on some of the best Irish cows to breed top AI bulls.
The ‘‘contracts for semen’’ debate is by no means over following the February resolution between the ICBF and LIC. With the advent of new techologies such as gene-editing and AI companies fighting for control of markets and market share, this is one debate that is very definitely only starting.
SHARING OPTIONS: