NZ Dairy Spring 2021

44 | nz dairy DAIRY PEOPLE » John & Nicola Guy Centre pivot irrigation among some major Kelly Deeks W aimate jersey farmers John and Nicola Guy are doing their bit for the future of the breed, with a sire proving scheme running on their herd for the past five years. He says what convinced him to give sire proving a go was when LIC told him he would be getting the bulls earlier than anyone else, and showed him how much other farmers had increased their breeding values since they had been sire proving. John has seen some breeding value gains in his own herd, but he doesn’t attribute all of them to sire proving. “My herd’s breeding value was increasing prior to sire proving because I used to nominate a lot of semen, I would pick the best bulls from LIC and CRV and use a mix of everything,” he says. “I think the biggest driver for increasing your BW is mating the bottom 25% of your herd to a beef bull. That’s the easiest way to get genetic gain. We AI all of our young stock and that gets us more daughters, so we can select a few more of our lower breeding cows.” John’s herd’s average BW is now sitting around 216, putting the herd in the top 2% in New Zealand. He contract mates cows every year with LIC, and says there is only a handful of jersey herds in his local area. “We are on very stony country here so the fact jerseys are not as heavy on the ground is not really an issue for us. I’ve always liked jerseys, I like the look of them, and as a smaller breed I find them to be in proportion to me!” John hasn’t had any unsatisfactory progeny as a result of sire proving, he’s had the odd one with bad udders or bad feet, but this is always possible with any type of breeding. “This is the way to get bull proven earlier,” he says. “All the bulls now are genomically selected instead of being picked on merit alone, so they already have the genetics be- hind them and they already have proven ancestry.” John runs 760 jerseys at Waimate, on the same farm he has sharemilked for the past 15 years. In an effort to decrease the amount of bought in feed, last season John decreased cow num- bers by about 40 cows, budgeting on 335,000kgs milksolids for the full herd, but actually producing 343,000kgs milksolids with a smaller herd. “So we’ve taken a but of pressure of the cows and got more per cow production.” Also last season, John put Allflex Livestock Intel- ligence collars on the herd, a monitoring solution which monitors animal health including rumination and heat detection. John, Ashley, Georgia and Nicola Guy on the farm (top). John runs 760 jerseys at Waimate (below). He says the system has already proven its worth as it picks up health issues days before the showing of any visual signs, and its heat detection capabili- ties helped to increase the six week in calf rate from 69% last season to 75% this season. “We don’t use any bulls so once we’ve done six weeks of AI with dairy semen, we go on to short term gestation cross bred semen for the last four weeks of mating, and that brings our late calvers forward by two weeks.” After 15 years of working with some rather inef- fective irrigation, John is now looking forward to a significant investment by farm owner Doug McIn- tyre who will have centre pivot irrigation installed by Christmas. This should see an increase of 20% to 25% in grass growth over the next few years. 0800 662 667 | milkmap.nz MilkMap Consulting are proud to assist John &Nicola Guy in maximising their farm productivity and pro tability. Proprietors: Kerry & Raewyn Still • Hydraulic Hose Repair Service • All Makes & Models of Machinery • Tractor & Farm Machinery Repairs in Workshop or on Farm SH 1, Pukeuri Junction, Oamaru 9436 | 03 431 3760 027 433 8030 | 03 431 3764 | www.stillsfarmmachinery.co.nz Meet Sidekick 0800 SK TIMARU | sidekickca.co.nz A fixed-fee accounting and advisory service like you’ve never seen before. Helping you define and achieve success