The couple, in their late 50s and early 60s, sold their 107ha Seaward Downs farm in Southland at the end of June but not before giving to the industry the top New Zealand bred bull for the year which won them the Mahoe Trophy at this year’s Holstein Friesian NZ conference.
Hazael Dauntless Freedom 109230 is one of many bulls the Schoutens have bred which have graced the pages of AI catalogues but this one earned the most points for traits, daughter production, conformation, and management this year.
With a Breeding Worth of 272, it sits eighth on the Holstein-Friesian RAS list. It was sired by MacFarlanes Dauntless and its mother is Hazael Raul Fuzz, which Hans described as one of the best cows he had ever milked.
“Its temperament was lovely and it had a very high protein score and a good udder,” he said.
But now he milks a house cow, a Shorthorn/Friesian, at their 2ha Invercargill lifestyle block and is not missing the long days dairying. Instead he frequents the weekly livestock sales on Tuesday mornings at Lorneville and grazes dairy stock and beef cattle on about 100ha nearby which they still call the runoff.
Their herd, which had a BW of more than 180 and a Production Worth of more than 200, placing it in the top 1% of herds in the country, was sold to Friesian breeders Nathan and Amanda Bayne who were moving from Taieri to a larger sharemilker position in North Otago.
“I’m glad Nathan and Amanda have got it. I didn’t want the herd broken up. They will look after it and keep up the breeding.”
Hans arrived in NZ as a one-year-old. His father was a market gardener in Holland but was looking for a new life after the war for his family. He went dairying and Hans followed. Margaret, an Auckland city girl, met him through her church youth group and thought working outside was a better idea than sitting in an office.
‘I didn’t want the herd broken up. They will look after it and keep up the breeding.’
They milked on the Hauraki Plains for eight years then moved to Maramarua in the northern Waikato and called their farm Hazael which is a biblical word meaning “whom God watches over”.
“When we went there it was so the children could go to a Christian school in Auckland and it stretched us financially but when we were there we always had enough money to pay the bills, even in the dry years,” Margaret said.
“God has given us the passion to breed a good dairy cow, and has provided all we have needed as a family in our 45 years of dairying,” Hans said.
Their six children, and 14 grandchildren, are now spread between Australia and NZ. Their three sons are on dairy farms – one an equity manager near Oxford and the other two managers in Southland.
After 13 years in Waikato the family moved south in 2001 to Seaward Downs to escape the dry.
“It’s so much nicer feeding green grass to cows,” Hans said. “Although it was surprising just how wet it is down here. You don’t get the drying compared with further north. Being coastal there is more cloud cover.”
It was at Maramarua that Hans started dabbling in breeding.
“It was his hobby, he needed a new challenge,” Margaret said.
Not interested in the show ring, Hans wanted to breed cows that would improve the national herd’s production and type and set out to do it.
“When I started I didn’t realise there were cows with a BW of over 200.”
He started buying a few cows each year at sales, looking for functional traits and high protein families. Cows which already had contracts for their embryos always caught his eye and the contracts often paid for the purchase price.
Vet Neil Sanderson (Dairy Exporter, February 2013, p94) has done his embryo work and although Hans had done an AI course, he preferred to use the local LIC technician.
“Their minds were always on the job more than mine and they were a lot faster than I could ever be.”
He used Premier Sires bulls as well as nominated semen, seeking out the highest BW bulls LIC had available, and he wasn’t afraid to mix things up.
“I always believed the Friesian/Jersey cross was the most efficient cow. We started milking Jerseys when we were married but decided it was better to milk fewer cows and get the same amount of milk so slowly changed to Friesian.”
He has enjoyed working with LIC and believes the company’s large sire-proving programme gives more reliable proofs for its bulls.
“They’ve always been a fair company to deal with. If something went wrong and it was their fault they always put it right. They’ve always been good people to deal with.”
However, he is not so sure about genomic selection.
“I feel we, the farmers, are sire-proving the DNA bulls. We need good proven sires which have reliability and genomic selection is not giving us that. Not yet.”
He said it was interesting to see the top bulls were consistently coming from proven top cow families, instead of from the general dairy population.
“Genomics gives us a bigger field to play with, as it’s easier to find the good bulls, but the top cows are still producing the top bulls.”
Although he has a few cows on the runoff which will be flushed this spring, this will be his last season breeding.
“I won’t have anywhere to milk them,” he said. “I’ve only got a one-set-of-cups shed for the house cow.”
