Saturday, March 30, 2024

Selling bulls but keeping semen rights

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Te Mania Stud is looking for sons of its sale-topping Australian sire to move the Angus breed forward. Starting this year the stud is keeping a 50% interest in the semen of all the bulls it sells.
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“This keeps us protected if one of the bulls comes through with brilliant traits and we can get that semen back to use through our dam line,” stock manager Will Wilding said. 

The deal involves only semen sales. There’s no income-share when buyers use the bulls for physical mating.

Semen from Te Mania Garth was brought from Australia and used to breed the top-priced rising two-year bull at the national sales in May and the top-price lot at the stud’s on-farm sale in June.

Other sons were sold in the on-farm sale and retaining the semen interest in them as well increases the prospects of finding some that will step-up as sires at the Parnassus stud in North Canterbury. 

“We’ll use a bit more from Garth but you’re always trying to find a son that is better,” Te Mania principal Tim Wilding said.

Commercial farmers are the bread-and butter customers Te Mania relies on but studs pay the best prices for bulls. 

“All customers are important but we’d like to see more bulls going to commercial farmers,” he said. 

“Studs buy in to improve their own herds and then it becomes very competitive so the semen interest reflects all the work we’ve put in.”

While the Australian-sired bulls have the honours Will Wilding also has high hopes for the first bull progeny of American sire Leupold. They’re coming up yearlings and looking really good, he said.

One of the Leupold bulls is among the 50 listed in the on-farm yearling sale in October and the others will go into the rising-two-year sale in June.  

At its latest record June on-farm sale Te Mania secured $47,000 for the top-price bull, as part of the $1.4 million gross return from the sale of 123 rising two-year bulls, a few weeks after topping the national sale with a $35,000 price. 

The income levels show the stud’s breeding programme is on track but is also very welcome given the extra feed costs the stud faced through the three years of drought across North Canterbury till autumn 2017, Tim Wilding said. 

The $47,000 animal was also used for stud duties as a yearling, with his first calves due next month.

Te Mania Angus in Australia has a sister herd to the Te Mania line-up at Parnassus. It started many years ago with cattle from the NZ stud.

Will Wilding has been stock manager at Te Mania for four years and took over the stud breeding responsibilities from his father last year. The top-priced bulls were from his first breeding programme. 

“I’ve been pretty lucky. It’s been a good market,” he says. 

Tim Wilding said the early success was a triumph for the new manager.

So far there have not been a lot of changes to how the stud operates, especially on the genetics focused on marbling traits but Will Wilding said he is placing more value on preparation and presentation of the sale bulls. He will use semen from Garth for another couple of years.

Te Mania will have about 520 calves born this season. It has bred from rising two-year heifers for the last 50 years though a bigger number are born from mature cows. 

This season most of the heifers have calved already. They are mated with specialist heifer-mating young bulls, bred for their lower birth weights.

Te Mania won’t know for several months how good this crop of calves will be but at least the heifer offspring have made a good start as none of the 100 or so heifers calved so far required human help with the births.  

That easy-calving quality is always something bull buyers are looking for. Genome tests are done on calves in December but the scanning data to show their worth for stud potential isn’t done till they are about 400 days old.

Tim Wilding wants the national bull sales to allow more information for potential buyers on how bulls perform stud duties as yearlings. 

Studs have to select their bulls in November for the May sale but Wilding has proposed that be put back to February. 

“There’s a lot that can change in that three or four months. I think we need to be revamping the competition to get the best bulls there and that would be good for the confidence of the buyers and the credibility of the breed.”

All the same, if the nomination for this year’s sale had been February rather than November,Te Mania would probably still have had the $35,000 sale-topper as its choice. 

Ahead of October’s yearling bull sale, Will Wilding says the beef sector is still showing good confidence.

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