Breeders at the Witchmount winery lunch 

Jim was speaking at the presentations of the South Eastern Australia finals of the Semex-Holstein Australia Holstein On-Farm competition at Melton. He had just returned from his annual trip to the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Canada (RAWF), where he met with Semex colleagues from around the globe.

Jim addressed his company’s decision to discontinue its Australian-based Young Sire Program after 15 years, effective from January 1, 2010, describing it as a positive move for the industry.

Semex will continue to market a selection of 10 to 15 elite genomically-tested young sires from the 400 that are offered by breeders for its international program every year.

The point of difference is that, while they will be available for use by Australian producers, they will be officially progeny tested in Canada or the US only – giving Australian-born sires a vital chance to make a global impact.

“Genomics is undoubtedly the term of the future,” Jim said. “There are three main reasons for our young progeny test sire decision. Firstly, by not conducting an Australia-based progeny test program it will save my business $250,000 a year.

“Secondly, in this country today 45% of its dairy producers are herd recording and 25% of them have useful data - that equals a limited amount of information that we can use.

“Thirdly, if we have a bull progeny tested in Australia and it only has an Australian proof, I cannot attract an international market for that bull.

“Without question, there is greater acceptability of North American proofs world-wide and the trend for other countries is that they convert all available sires into a US or Canadian base. The reality is that in this scenario sires that achieve only an Australian proof find it difficult to make an impact.”

Jim believes that Australia has the bloodlines to impress other countries and that Canada and the US are the countries to get this country across the line.

“I have no doubt that there are cattle in the Australian population that could make a significant contribution to world genetics. They just need to be identified and identified in the USDA system (United States Department of Agriculture), which includes a lot of collaborative work between the five major North American artificial breeding companies, including Semex.”

He urged breeders who had potential bull mothers on their farms to consider having them genomically tested so Semex could work with them.

“This is a very, very positive thing for the future – an exciting new era for the AI (artificial breeding) industry that I am quite looking forward to.

“I urge Australia to join the world, rather than to be just Australian. Don’t get me wrong, I am very proud to be Australian, but our business is global now. I hope you’ll join with us.”

* Some background information on Genomics

• Genomics is the study of genes on an animal’s chromosome, which predicts how traits will be expressed in resulting calves.
•  SNPs (Single nucleotide polymorphism), which is pronounced “SNIPS”, are the genetic markers which identify traits.
• US breeding companies have been corporative in their work and they now have more than 18,000 bulls with DNA samples and daughter records (predominately Holstein) for about six million daughters world-wide.
• Genomics was included in official US genetic evaluations from January 2009. However, the reality is that artificial breeding companies have been using the information as an in-house resource for longer than that.