Crossbreeding dairy cows - podcast transcriptions
Crossbreeding dairy cows
Greg: Welcome to Dairy News. My name’s Greg Mills and I have with me today Tony Dowman. Today we’re going to be exploring crossbreeding of dairy cows. Tony, what are the things to consider if you’re thinking about crossbreeding?
Tony: The first thing you need to consider is what you’re getting paid for your milk, what is the payment structure, are you being paid on litres, are you being paid on components and what are the penalties if you get these numbers wrong? Historically we’ve moved away from the Channel Island breeds of the past.
Milk pricing in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s dictated that the Holstein Friesian was the better breed to have because it was very high litreage milk at the expense of test percents and components, but our payment structure didn’t give you any bonuses if you were producing high quality milk.
But those days are over now and the pricing system has changed. There may be an opportunity to start looking at crossbreeding cows again.
Greg: So some dairy farmers are keen to keep their pure breed lines, is there a role for those pure breed lines?
Tony: There is a substantial amount of stud breeders in the industry and they take a lot of pleasure from pure breeding certain breeds of cattle, and I’m not suggesting that you should not do that at all. If that’s the game you’re in, that you have a great deal of pleasure from breeding purebred animals, so be it. But some commercial farms may get some benefit from either the so-called hybrid vigour that you get when you start mixing animals together.
The other thing is it gives you very, very large gene pool to pick from. If you are at present running animals such as Jerseys or Guernseys or Ayrshires or [1:36] Reds or whatever, the gene pool in the world these days is getting quite small and by using crossbreeding it gives you the opportunity to get away from the small gene pool of your breed to go and have a look elsewhere to see if there are better bulls or cows that you could inject a bit of new genes into your herd.
Greg: What sort of traits would I be chasing through crossbreeding? What should I be focusing on?
Tony: Well it depends where you live. The cows that are required for the coast or you generally see on the north coast are a little bit smaller than the inland cattle. So you really don’t want 750 kilogram cows on the coast here or in a higher rainfall area where they bogged up to their knees at times. So we tend to get smaller animals on the coast and the crossbred on the coast would be quite an acceptable option. Going to the drier inland areas where they can handle the bigger frame cows, then they may choose to stay with the larger frame cows which means staying largely with the Holstein Friesian.
So it depends where you live and depends which processor you are supplying, will determine ultimately whether crossbreeding has a future for you from a financial point of view.
Greg: So has crossbreeding been taking up much throughout New South Wales that you’ve seen from your experience?
Tony: Generally no, but what’s been happening is that people have been dabbling with other breeds in their herd and Brown Swiss is a classic example where people thought Brown Swiss would be a good idea. So they bring in a bit of Brown Swiss semen, put it over some of their cows to see what the progeny look like, and some people are happy with a crossbred animal, some people aren’t. Their colour scheme goes a bit haywire when you put Friesians and Jerseys together. You end up with black animals and some people just don’t like that colour, a finer boned black animal.
But if the colour doesn’t worry you and you’re really there just for the purpose of producing your income stream from milk and not through stud sales or the sale of big [coal 3:30] cows, then crossbreeding may be an option for you.
Greg: Thank you Tony.
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