LIC extends New Zealand Dairy Industry Awards sponsorship
LIC has reaffirmed its sponsorship of the New Zealand Dairy Industry Awards (NZDIA) by signing up as a national sponsor for another three years.
New Zealand farmers are lining up to use 'once-in-a-lifetime' bull Howies Checkpoint in the upcoming dairy mating season.
LIC's Checkpoint is the best artificial breeding bull ever bred in New Zealand boasting a Breeding Worth (BW) of 327 (83% reliability), a full 60 BW ahead of the second placed sire Fairmont Mint Edition, also from LIC.
The average BW of the KiwiCross Daughter Proven team is 241, more that 20 higher than the Holstein Friesian and Jersey teams.
LIC's general manager genetics, Peter Gatley, says the KiwiCross bull will mate more than a quarter of a million cows this spring.
"That's a big workload for any bull but it's made possible by using our fresh semen technology which delivers 10 times the number of straws as conventional frozen," Gatley says.
"We are doing our best to ensure that every farmer who signs up for the KiwiCross team gets a fair share of him."
Through the spring mating period, Checkpoint will be collected every second morning on LIC's Newstead bull farm, creating up to 5000 straws of fresh semen to be inseminated into cows all over the country the following morning.
"A bull as good as Checkpoint only comes along once in a lifetime, but we have to balance the temptation to overuse him. One of the challenges we have is to provide a variety of different bloodlines needed for genetic diversity.
"It's been 40 years since the country has had a sire which is light-years ahead of its peers. The last bull to make the quantum leap achieved by Checkpoint, was Maori Bestman, a Jersey born in 1967."
Gatley says Checkpoint is 9/16 Holstein Friesian and is strong across all traits
"He's the total package, a great looking bull with wonderful conformation and temperament."
Howies Checkpoint is a result of an LIC contract mating with a past top bull, Shalendy Amorous, and one of the best cows in New Zealand, the product of the GeneRate embryo programme.
When he was born, DNA analysis identified his elite status, but it was his daughters who proved just how good he really is when they came into milk in 2011.
"Sometimes an offspring will end up with an extraordinary selection of the best genes, surpassing both parents, and that is what's happened here," Gatley says.
NZPork has appointed Auckland-based Paul Bucknell as its new chair.
The Government claims to have delivered on its election promise to protect productive farmland from emissions trading scheme (ETS) but red meat farmers aren’t happy.
Foot and Mouth Disease outbreaks could have a detrimental impact on any country's rural sector, as seen in the United Kingdom's 2000 outbreak that saw the compulsory slaughter of over six million animals.
The Ministry for the Environment is joining as a national award sponsor in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards (BFEA from next year).
Kiwis are wasting less of their food than they were two years ago, and this has been enough to push New Zealand’s total household food waste bill lower, the 2025 Rabobank KiwiHarvest Food Waste survey has found.
OPINION: Sir Lockwood Smith has clearly and succinctly defined what academic freedom is all about, the boundaries around it and the responsibility that goes with this privilege.
OPINION: For years, the ironically named Dr Mike Joy has used his position at Victoria University to wage an activist-style…
OPINION: A mate of yours truly has had an absolute gutsful of the activist group SAFE.