Teagasc advice for dairy farmers: Select bulls for higher solids than your herd

The current bull proof figures (March 2017) are the most accurate and up-to-date, and they are the only figures you should look at when choosing your AI sires for this season, advises John McNamara, in the Carbery/teagasc Joint Programme.

He recommends never using a sire of greater than 1.5% calving difficulty (based on actual calves born) on a heifer.

“A heifer is doing enough of a job for you in her first lactation in calving at all, and producing milk, without running the added risk of a difficult calving.

“In fact, my personal preference is to only put heifers in calf to Jersey, to guarantee an easy calving.”

He recommends only using bulls with less than 3% calving difficulty on mature cows, and this figure applies to any beef bulls used too.

“Of course, big mature cows can calve AI sires with higher calving difficulty, but you are increasing the risk of a difficult calving and all the subsequent labour problems that will cause next year.

“One cow down creates more work than 20 extra cows calving.

“You are paid for the kilograms of fat and protein you sell off the farm, and there is a charge for the milk (or water, as I say) that this floats in.

“This charge is to cover the cost of transport and processing of this water.

“So you should concentrate on selecting bulls that have more kilograms of solids than your herd has already.

“Choose bulls that have at least 0.1% for both fat and protein, if you want to make real progress in improving your milk composition, and therefore, milk price.

“Sire Advice on the ICBF website is a great tool for choosing bulls.

“You can choose the main areas you want to improve and it will suggest the best bulls for this.

“Most of the bulls available have a genomic proof only.

“This is the average of their parents plus their genomic information.

“ A bull will be seven years old before he will get a high reliability daughter proof, especially for his fertility, as his daughters have to calve down for a second time to get high reliability.

“So it is vital that you always use a team of at least five genomic bulls, to spread your risk. Too many farms have been only using one or two genomic bulls, and this can lead to a big drop (or increase) in the EBI of their replacements.

“Until you are happy you have fertility of 85% plus calving in six weeks, and less than 9% not in calf after 12 weeks breeding, then your first priority in choosing bulls is their fertility index.

“I suggest using no bull less than €100 for the fertility sub index.

“The same criteria one uses for selecting AI sires should be used if you are buying a dairy stock bull that will produce heifers that you will milk.

“EBI is an economic breeding index, so cows of €100 EBI are leaving €200 more per lactation than cows with an EBI of €0 (twice her EBI, as her EBI is half her genetic merit, the amount she will pass on to her calf, and the calf gets the other half from the sire).

“A lot of stock bulls have very low EBI.”