Will silver turn to gold for state farmer?

Simply put, it’s about producing a sire that will meet the requirements of the dairy farmer to produce a calf that has an easy calver but also meets the needs of calf rearers, finishers and right through the beef value chain.

Goudies Station, southeast of Reporoa, is unusual and complex. It’s a long narrow farm – 1779ha effective and 18km long – and among other things acts as a firebreak between Timberlands forests. It’s a serious drive from one end of the farm to the other, but the laneways are good, the land is flat and travel is easy. The soil is light pumice, but rainfall and heavy overnight dews make for good grass growth.

It’s a breeding operation and, on the beef side, the team at Goudies works closely with Focus Genetics and LIC. As well, the farm has a nationally recognised Romney ram breeding operation, and 1400 hinds are also run on the property.

This is quite a handful for farm manager Tim Bowron who’s a career farmer having been brought up on a sheep and beef farm near Taupo. He’s been the manager at Goudies for seven years now and he and his six permanent staff and other contractors run the property. Daily they deal with a multiplicity of important and complex tasks on farm and interact with outside organisations which have an interest in the Goudies breeding programmes.

But it’s the beef breeding work that’s turning heads in the dairy and beef sectors as the heat is now on to utilise what was often seen as an unwanted by-product of the dairy industry – the bobby calf. Slaughtering bobby calves internationally is seen as a negative and a waste. One of the problems has been the variability of the calves produced by dairy farmers – other than those used as replacements.

The work at Goudies is geared to producing a high-quality sire to go over the cows that farmers don’t want to keep a replacement heifer from. The goal is to get a consistently saleable, fast-growing quality calf that will give a high return and can probably be ready for slaughter in 18 months.

The answer is simply silver – well actually Silver Stabilizer, which is the name given to the special sires that have been bred here since the programme began 18 months ago. Bowron says the Silver Stabilizer is the marker gene that can easily be identified by the dairy industry, indicating short gestation, low birthweight and high performance.

The Silver Stabiliser is a saleable, fast-growing quality calf marker gene.

“This is all very new. We are running 350 Silver Stabilizer cows and these are a combination of the Simmental, Red Angus and Gelbvieh. The latter is a cattle breed originating in Germany and is primarily used for beef production. These are crossed with a Charolais and what we are getting is a silver-coloured calf which is an easier identifier when mated over dairy cows,” says Bowron.

The Race Is On

The race is now on at Goudies to speed up the programme to get the genetic gain that they believe is possible.

Tim Bowron says it’s not only about producing the perfect calf but having the hard data to back this up and being able to convince all those in the dairy beef value chain that they are onto a winner.

“We expect this programme to run for another three or four years, because we want to conclusively prove it works internally before we express this in the commercial world – both in dairy and beef farms,” he says.

The other part of the equation is of course the type/breed of dairy cows that the Silver Stabilizer will be put over. For several years, the kiwi cross has been the choice of many dairy farmers. But Bowron says Pāmu moved away from this some years ago and is putting more Friesian into the mix. He points out that the Friesian adds more size and also reduces the amount of yellow fat from the Jersey.

“The ultimate goal is to produce from those dairy cows, from which a replacement is not kept, a consistent and saleable beef animal that is at least as good as, if not better than the traditional beef animal, and at the same time go some way to solving the bobby calf problem. That will be the gold standard,” he says.