Cattle Breeding: KiwiCross coming to the fore for NZ dairying
February 22nd, 2010
In only five years, a new breed of dairy sire – KiwiCross – has moved up the popularity stakes and is now breeding a quarter of NZ’s dairy cows. KiwiCross(tm) 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. Since 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.
LIC GM of Genetics, Peter Gatley, says the popularity of the breed validates the decision to begin progeny testing ten years ago. “There were some very good reasons to take the plunge Crossbred cattle have always been present in the NZ dairy herd; you could talk to farmers pre 2004 and many would say some of their most fertile and productive cows, were crossbreeds.”
Gatley says one of the benefits of having a crossbred bull category is farmers get access to a whole new gene pool to breed the next generation of bulls. LIC can scan the database of 4m cows and identify the best to contract mate. 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.
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