Those farmers who milk and breed Ayrshire are keen to develop, promote and maintain the breed as a credible option for dairy farmers.
As a young child Taranaki farmer Gordon Glentworth had a passion for the Ayrshire cow even though his father had a predominately Jersey herd.
Little did he know back then but in 1977 he would start a successful Ayrshire stud Sanrosa Stud.
“When I was a kid I used to fill out dad’s AI book. You wrote down A, J or F for the bull breed. Some days when I filled it out I put A down instead of J for the breed of sire. So we got some Jersey-Ayrshire calves,” he says.
“When dad began herd testing he discovered that they were the top-producing cows in the herd. With that hybrid vigour they should have been too but as a result dad began to use more Ayrshire genetics.”
Glentworth believes the Ayrshire cow is a viable dairy animal in the modern herd. His 27-year commitment to Semayr Breeding Services is testament to that belief. In 1992 he become chairman of the Semayr board.
Semayr began in the late 1980s as a division of the Ayrshire Association of NZ to give farmers the ability to buy semen with different genetics to those then available from AB companies.
It began by marketing a few bulls that had been privately proven in herds and also used some overseas semen. LIC now markets all Semayr bulls.
“In 1992 we increased the number of unproven bulls. We started offering NZ-bred young bulls as well as our proven bulls. In 1998 LIC stopped sire proving so we took over that role.
“We increased the number of bulls and we really needed to do so. Geneticists from around the world had told me that if we wanted to keep pace with the major breeds then we needed to put 25-30 bulls through per year.”
At one stage they were proving more than 30 Ayrshire bulls a year.
The next step was the establishment of a genomic testing programme. Semayr has taken a little longer to begin genomic testing because of the need to establish reliability in the results. It’s also a numbers game and it realises it cannot do it on its own in NZ.
Many of the Semayr genetics have Scandinavian blood so Semayr will begin testing the genetics in Scandinavia.
“Our first aim is to test a group of our proven bulls with their system. We’re initially looking for a correlation between our breeding values and the results of the Scandinavian genomic tests. If there’s no correlation then it probably won’t go any further.
“I’m pretty hopeful that it’ll be all right because our bulls have some of those genetics in them. We’ve now cut back to around 12 to 15 bulls proven per year. By using genomic testing, if successful, we hope we can get that down to four or five each year. It would also mean we could have a much smaller bull farm than our current 60ha Opunake farm.”
Semayr bought the farm several years ago and runs up to 90 lay-off bulls on it. Those bulls are animals that have had semen collected from them as yearlings for progeny testing. They are then held over for four or five years until they are proven. The farm is also used for the scheme’s selected weaner bulls.
Promising bull calves are offered to the scheme by breeders. LIC also uses their system to help find promising young bulls.
“LIC provide a printout of the highest BW Ayrshire cows throughout the country and also runs pedigrees for us so that we can select from them.
“We usually are offered 50-60 young bulls and then we go through them using all of the information we have at hand. We cut that selection down to about 15 bulls.”
It selects bulls with high breeding values on production because it wants to use genomic testing as a tool in the selection process.
“This year we’ve taken in four full brothers. If we had genomic information available we might take only one or two.”
Recently Semayr has made great gains on the type and production qualities of its bulls. It has bulls that score up to 0.7 for udders. Once there were bulls that wouldn’t make zero. There were other bulls out there that were high in type but lacked in production.
He prefers to produce genetic lines of animals and often uses 150-200 straws from one bull if he believes it’s good enough. That provides a good run of daughters and helps prevent inbreeding.
“The fewer bulls I use the further I can look out for something different. If you’re using bits of everything it can become a bit of a mess.
Glenthworth uses a selection of the best-ranked NZ bulls depending on availability. At the moment he is using a split of two-thirds NZ bulls and one-third Finnish.
“The Finnish bull we’ll be using this year is a complete out-cross to 95-98% of my herd.”
Glentworth’s herd has gained about 100kg MS a cow by using Finnish genetics and they are now producing about 1kg MS per kg of bodyweight.
His production is on target to hit 600kg MS a cow and higher.
“We are hoping to hit a record this season of over 610kg MS per cow.”
A bull that Glentworth considers the best is one he bred, Sanrosa Deacon.
“We’re using Deacon over all of the cows that aren’t related to him. He’s our first choice. This year we have a new bull come through that is Deacon’s half-brother, Dalton, out of the same cow.
“We’ll be using him over the animals that are related to Deacon on the sire’s side but not the dam’s side. The ones we can’t mate to him will be mated to the Finnish bull. It’s been quite a buzz to produce two bulls of that quality.”
He puts a lot of emphasis on the breeding values of fat and protein. Deacon, for example, rates 28 for fat and 27 for protein and Dalton sits at 28 for protein and 19 for fat. Both bulls are a2a2.
Even though there is now a greater emphasis on fat he feels it could be short-lived and aims to keep his herd’s protein level up.
He milks 25 Friesian cows that are used as a comparison to his Ayrshires. They are an accurate, direct comparison because they are bred to the best genetics and farmed in exactly the same conditions as his Ayrshires.
“If I had only one breed it would be very easy to think ‘gee aren’t I doing well?’ But what are you comparing them with? It’s a yardstick that doesn’t cost anything because they put milk in the vat.
“The Friesians are 130-150 BW units ahead of my Ayrshires but they don’t produce that much more. I do consider the BW but more so production breeding values and TOP. As I have only 25 I like to be quite selective and use one high-standard, out-cross bull over them all.”
At one stage the Friesians were about 90kg MS a cow ahead of his Ayrshires. Now it is less than 20. That sometimes alters depending on the make-up of the age group. Because he farms only 25 Friesians, some years there might be only two heifers coming in, which distorts the make-up of the maturity group.
He says Deacon and Dalton would never have been accepted into the breeding team solely on BW but they had top-class production breeding values. He feels the BW system is the reason many farmers don’t use Ayrshires.
“You can’t get anywhere without production. Personally, I feel the BW system is a good system for the major breeds but out of kilter for minor breeds because we‘re now in the margin of error.
“The breeding values of our best bulls for production are as good as any of the crossbred bulls and half of the Friesian team and all of the Jersey team yet we’re 100 BW units behind. People don’t buy Ayrshire breed because their BW isn’t high enough. It’s a little disappointing.”
While BW remains so important to the financial sector Glentworth feels the Ayrshire is going to struggle as a breed. He believes there needs to be some dialogue with animal valuers about the BW system.
In some countries the Ayrshire has reputation for being a show cow because some farmers feel it is bred only for the show ring, not for production. It’s a name he hates to hear.
“One problem I often see in NZ is that farmers buy 20 or 30 Ayrshire cows and breed them to a whim and the fancy of show ring sires, whereas the rest of the herd is bred to high-BW, high-production bulls.
“They then look at their records and notice the Ayrshires are behind and wonder why they have them. But it’s actually their doing by breeding them that way. They blame the breed instead of looking at themselves.”
He hardly ever has to pick up a set of cups when he trains his Ayrshire heifers on the rotary platform. He usually has more problems training his one or two Friesian heifers.
“I’d hate to see the Ayrshire breed disappear from the NZ dairy herd. I feel that production-wise they still have a place,” he says.
“To put it into perspective, if every Ayrshire cow in NZ died in one night it would make less of a difference to the curve on the national milk graph than a southerly storm going through the country. We’re here to help the progress of the Ayrshire breed and I believe we are doing that.”
