For all of the Naked Villainy readers who visit our site every day, eagerly anticipating a cow insemination post, this one is for you!
Bonnie’s suitor’s semen has arrived all the way from Norway: Svarstad
I will breed her this year with a Norweigen Red Bull.
My goal is to get a heifer that has thrifty grazing genetics, hardiness, heterosis, longer teats, high fertility, and the potential to throw meaty calves.
Unlike the American dairy system that has used the factory model to turn cows from solar-driven grass eating machines into petroleum-driven (tractor-based forage harvesting) grain bins, many other nations have developed more profitable, sustainable small dairy systems based on intensive grazing. New Zealand’s system is the best known, but the Scandinavians are no slouches at grass-based dairying.
The Norweigen Red breed is a hardy one, devloped to graze the cold hilly upcountry. When I combine that with Bonnie’s Scottish ancestry, I ought to get a tough, healthy cow.
Most dairy cows, particularly Holsteins, are massively inbred. The advent of artificial insemination has allowed for rapid genetic progress in the creation of giant, short-lived cows that can turn grain into milk at astounding rates. However, since good bulls can sire thousands of offspring and new bulls are selected from the progeny of the previous good bulls, the genetic base has become narrow indeed - to the point that the inbreeding has seriously affected traits like fertility. One reason I chose the Ayrshire was because, of the dairy breeds, it had suffered comparatively less pressure genetic pressure - the suped-up Holsteins quickly pushed the minor breeds to the fringes on factory farms where size and ability to process grain were all. But even the Ayrshire’s genetic base is narrower then it ought to be. Heterosis is the biological principle in which crossbred offspring typically see major trait gains as the result of the efficacy or reducing inbreeding. Unfortunately, the heterosis is only valuable if you keep switching in outcrosses so it is not generally used with Holsteins because the offspring would be smaller and smaller as the more minor breeds played into a continuing rotation. Holstein milk production is so far above that of other breeds that even with heterosis, the next generation would have less milk production than the parent. For example, imagine a Holstein averaging 30,000 lbs/milk/lactation. Breed her to a good Holstein bull and you might get a heifer throwing 32,000 lbs. If you bred her to a Jersey bull with a PTA for milk in the 20,000 lb range, the resulting crossbed would throw around 25,000 based on averages. (It wouldn’t be right in the middle because there are other factors involved, but it works for our example). The heterosis affect might add a 10% gain - so the crossbred cow, while healthier, would only be expected to throw 27,500 lbs. The 4,500 pound difference would mean an extra $900 of milk per year. Even if the crossbred heifer has fewer health problems, greater longevity, less mastitis, and is thriftier (uses less food per unit of milk profuced), the gap might only close to $200/year. That inbred purebred differential gain of $200/year in the annual bottom line is a crucial improvement when you average that over hundreds of cows and have to pay a multi-million dollar bank not that you took out to build your free stall barn and manure lagoon.
Squeezing the last dollar out of production isn’t the goal of Sweet Seasons Farm. I don’t owe $100,000 on a combine, $40,000 for a tractor, $2,000,000 for a manure disposal system, or $500,000 for a milking parlor. The major capital expense at Sweet Seasons Farm has been the building of the barn, which was accomplished for around $6,000 dollars since it was built by the truty firm of Vater Smallholder & Son.
In the case of this small organic farm, the trade-off of slightly less production is minimized because I’m not starting from a Holstein base, what little drop will hardly be noticed, and animal health is a major goal as its own end.
The longer teat issue is also a function of being a small farm. The advent of mechanical milking machines has made teat size irrelevent to production - the vacuum pressure, unlike a farmer’s aching fingers, cares not how long a cow’s teats are. In fact, in a confinement situation where animals are crowded, long teats are a disadvantage because resting cows get stepped on by their herdmates. Animals that spend a great deal of time resting on manure packs also expose their teats to bacterial infection - and the longer the teats are, the greater the area exposed. So farmers have been breeding for smaller teats.
I milk by hand. I can barely get two fingers around Bonnie’s back teats. I wanted a cow with longer teats and found a bull that throws that trait in the Norwegian Red herdbook.
Norweigen Reds are also noted for their high fertiltiy and the heterosis will help on this level as well. Since I breed AI, this trait is important. It takes an average of three or four breedings for a Holstein to “catch” nowadays. Ayrshires average 2 or 3. It took 2 to get Bonnie in calf last year. Bonnie is a good cow that does not suffer from the environmental stress depressing fertility in confinement operations, rotationally grazes (which increases relative fertility), and doesn’t suffer from grain-induced acidosis, so she should be pretty fertile. But I want to keep breeding to make that trait better and better. Each breeding will run me around $40, so as a percentage of costs, can be a big slice of my tiny pie. Heterosis will also help.
Most dairy calves end up as veal. I raise mine to be petit beef. Dairy animals tend to be very thin and angular, so a larger proportion of the nutrition of the animals destined for the table goes into bone. If I could get calves that are blockier, they’ll gain weight faster and improve my paycheck at the end of the year. Norweigen Reds have many dual-breed charecteristics - the males are raised for beef, so my crossbreed, if male, should have a blockier frame than a straight Ayrshire calf.
As an additional bonus, Svarstad is homozygoously polled, which means that I will not have to dehorn the calf.
