In only five years, a ‘new’ breed of dairy sire has moved up the popularity stakes and is now breeding a quarter of New Zealand’s dairy cows.
KiwiCross™ was launched in 2005 by LIC - the first team of proven crossbred bulls in the world - and its market share has grown every year since.
Today, five years after their introduction, 23 of the 25 bulls on the RAS Crossbred List are LIC’s KiwiCross and eight KiwiCross bulls feature prominently among the top 30 ranked all breeds.
This, according to LIC General Manager of Genetics, Peter Gatley, validates the decision to begin progeny testing ten years ago.
“There were some very good reasons to take the plunge, but it was still a big risk at the time. Progeny testing takes many years and millions of dollars before a penny is earned, so if the concept doesn’t fly, you don’t find out until you’ve already got a huge commitment. Fortunately the KiwiCross concept is a real winner.
"Crossbred cattle have always been present in the New Zealand dairy herd; you could talk to farmers pre 2004 and many would say some of their most fertile and productive cows, were crossbreeds.
"Until that point, no AB company in the world had invested heavily in the 'breed', conducting years of sire proving to 'prove' how good they really were,” says Peter Gatley.
"One of the benefits of having a crossbred bull category is that we get access to a whole new gene pool of top cows to breed the next generation of bulls.
“We can scan the database of 4 million cows and identify the best to contract mate, but of course we always find that many of the very best are crossbreds and so can’t be used to generate a Holstein Friesian or Jersey bull. They can, however, produce a KiwiCross”.
The most famous KiwiCross bull, Scotts Northsea, was a member of the first team and is still an active sire, inducted to LIC's Hall of Fame in 2008. Northsea is a 'true' crossbred, his genetics representing Holstein-Friesian, Jersey and Ayshire.
*The Ranking of Active Sires (RAS) is a list of ranking of sires, nominated by New Zealand AB (artificial breeding) companies, ranked by Breeding Worth (BW) - which is the national breeding objective. An active sire is one which is likely to have at least 500 doses of semen available in the following mating season.
