The so-called “slick cows” have body temperatures up to 1degC cooler than non-slick cows and they drink less, putting less stress on limited water supplies.
Tropical Dairy Group (TDG) has successfully bred a cow that can handle the heat and may also help New Zealand lower its agriculture emissions.
The goal was to create naturally heat-tolerant cattle that produce good quality milk, chair Tim Heeley says.
The original focus was on large commercial farms in heat-scorched Africa and on food and protein security.
However, it’s become “very much a global solution to what is becoming quite a recognised problem in farming around the world as temperatures get warmer”.
Heeley says he only had to look out the window in Waikato, where it recently hit 28degC and 80% humidity and it’s not even summer yet.
Tropical Dairy “can place an animal in the right environment for a farming system whether that’s in Zimbabwe, Kenya, South America, even here in NZ or in the US, where there is heat stress”.
According to DairyNZ, cows begin to experience heat stress at much lower temperatures than humans and prefer to be below 20degC. All areas of the country get hot enough to cause heat stress during summer, it said.
“Like humans, when you get hot and stressed, you basically begin to shut down and don’t operate properly. That’s exactly what happens with cows,” Heeley said.
It’s both an animal welfare and a production problem.
The people who started the business more than a decade ago recognised that in the tropics – in Costa Rica and Venezuela – there were a very small number of breeds that were actually a cross between a tropical and a non-tropical animal.
That kicked off an NZ breeding programme.
Around about 2015, the specific gene linked to heat resistance – the so-called “slick gene” – was discovered. By then, TDG was about 10 generations into developing the herd.
After more than a decade of natural breeding, the Waikato-based company has a herd of 500, with 150 bulls, that have no horns, are a2 milkers and are tolerant to the heat, among other traits.
So-called “slick cows” have body temperatures up to 1degC cooler than non-slick cows and they drink less, putting less stress on limited water supplies.
Not only that – and thanks to an extensive database – Heeley says “we know the milk performance of our cows in New Zealand is at or above the NZ average”.
According to Heeley, one cow will produce up to 1.5 times the average NZ cow at the moment.
This is an added bonus in the current context for NZ farming and agricultural emissions.
“The pressure is on New Zealand farming. As we know, there is huge pressure to de-stock,” he said.
“Our cattle are a great replacement option for farmers because of the milk volumes they produce and also the increasingly warm weather,” he said.
TDG isn’t hampered by a likely ban on live animals as it supplies semen straws and embryos and can export to around 100 countries.
“We are just dispatching genetic material. No animals move,” he said.
South East Asia is one of its core markets, with the Philippines now milking second lactation daughters.
TDG also has its own herd in America, with around 20 animals.
It’s an expensive business, however.
“While we are in the early stages of revenue and creating revenue, the development work still needs to continue in the background,” he said.
As a result, it is in the middle of a $3 million capital raise on Catalist, a new exchange designed for small and medium-sized businesses, which hopes to be a stepping stone for businesses that are too small to list on the NZX.
The plan is to publicly list on Catalist and raise a further $2m in early 2022.
Among other things, funds will support distributors in NZ, US, Philippines and distributor establishment in Brazil and Australia, two key markets.
They will also further develop the NZ and US bull team and breeding nuclei.
“It’s quite a capital intensive business and we’ve done it on a shoestring for many years,” he said.
“You need to feed the machine that’s doing this.”
