Farmer Writes: breeding blind science

Grass has really started kicking into gear, cows are milking exceptionally well with big numbers bulling every day and thoughts are starting to turn to the oncoming breeding season already. There is rain forecast for this week but hopefully it won’t hit ground conditions too hard.

The longer days and higher temperatures should see us finished with cubicles for the year. We had to use them for a few days last week with the milking herd back in standing-off on Tuesday and Wednesday but hopefully that is the end of it for this spring. Weeds are taking off as well with the warm weather, so we’ve gone out with a few tanks of spray earlier this week to try to keep them under control for the grazing season.

We spread urea across the whole farm last week to bring us up to 75 units of nitrogen out so far. The next round will include some cut-sward for the silage ground and maybe Richland for the cow ground to keep things moving forward. Hopefully we will see magic day soon and we can start to think about cutting silage rather than feeding it out.

We will get most of the calf sales tidied up this week.

We have a dozen cows left to calve now which will stretch out into the middle of April and hopefully get finished up a couple of weeks before breeding starts again.

Breeding decisions this year are proving very difficult for disciples of the EBI index and the genomic index in particular. The last few weeks have seen the goalposts moving faster than statues of the Virgin Mary back in the mid-1980s.

Some AI straws will have to be taken back out of pots having dropped off the active bull list between proof runs.

Other bulls have probably been under-priced, having jumped to the top of the list on the latest results.

The catalogues, despite all of their fancy pictures and numbers, have all been rendered obsolete this week too. The re-ranking means that the top bulls are often buried in the middle section of the catalogue with a half page. It won’t bother us much on this farm what happens with these high-flier bulls, but there has been a lot of money wasted with a few clicks of a keyboard over the last few weeks.

In my opinion, these fancy bulls with the magic numbers might as well be printed with disappearing ink on disposable napkins, but that’s another day’s work. Many farmers out there have invested heavily in these bulls over the years and they’d like a bit more assurance that the figures are science-based and accurate and not subject to sweeping changes on the eve of the most important decision making season of the year.

Bull list

At the moment on the active bull list, there is one Friesian bull and 74 Holstein Friesian bulls.

In the meantime, we will have to keep using the old methods of selecting bulls out of good cow families by proven sires and hope that they produce the goods. It’s a worry every year when the heifers start to calve in and get milk recorded but we’re rarely disappointed. I’m not sure I’d be any less worried if working off numbers on a page.