Silver Fern Farms has defended the payment of premiums for certain breeds of lamb, saying the market paid more for certain animals which met certain criteria reports The ODT. Farmers have criticised the meat co-operative for paying farmers a 10c a kg premium for Primera-bred lambs supplied under contract to Marks and Spencer, but Silver Fern Farms said to qualify, the lambs had to meet standards demanded by the supermarket chain.  SFF livestock manager Grant Howie said lamb breed was just one criterion demanded by Marks and Spencer.

Suppliers also had to monitor their carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emissions, land management impact and have plans for the environment, quality assurance, animal welfare and food safety, he said. “This is the old market averaging model versus the new integrated-market led model. When it comes to the Marks and Spencer programme, there is more value in the total programme than an average market programme.”

(more…)

AgResearch will soon seek regulatory approval for field trials of new transgenic grasses it claims could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. AgResearch’s applied biotechnologies manager, Jimmy Suttie, said the transgenic grasses had both environmental and productivity advantages reports The ODT. The grasses were high in energy, which meant fewer animals were needed to get the same production, reducing the amount of methane released.

The science behind the forage meant digestion of the plant was more efficient, cutting the amount of methane produced by animals and increasing energy that went into tissue and productivity. But Dr Suttie said the technology also had implications for further research to cut methane emissions and reduce the volume of water required by the plants.

(more…)

Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers. Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them, are entering milking herds across the country — and the timing could hardly be worse reports The New York Times.

The US dairy industry is in crisis, with prices so low that farmers are selling their milk below production cost. The industry is struggling to cut output. And yet the wave of excess cows is about to start dumping milk into a market that does not need it. “It’s real simple,” said Tony De Groot, an early adopter of the new breeding technology, who milks 4,200 cows on a farm here in the heart of this state’s struggling dairy region. “We’ve just got too many cattle on hand and too many heifers on hand, and the supply just keeps on coming and coming.”

(more…)

Two of the leading players in NZ agriculture – Silver Fern Farms and Livestock Improvement (LIC) – have jointly developed a pilot programme which when proven, will deliver “enabling knowledge” to implement an integrated supply chain from farmer partners of Silver Fern Farms to their international customer partners.

· Silver Fern Farms is New Zealand’s leading procurer, processor and marketer of lamb, mutton, beef, venison and associated products to more than 60 countries
· LIC is one of the largest integrated herd improvement organisations in the world with proven data and analysis management.

(more…)

World burger giant McDonald’s has given the NZ meat industry a boost with a deal to buy an extra 500,000kg of angus beef for two new premium burgers reports Stuff. The contract is estimated to be worth at least an extra $5 million to the industry. The meat will be used in angus burgers in the United States, Canada and Australia, as well as in NZ, where they will sell for $7.20.

Angus is noted for a fine texture and slight marbling that gives it a special flavour, and has been a four-year winner in the Steak of Origin taste contest. McDonald’s is NZ’s biggest beef buyer and the angus deal will lift its annual purchase to 25.2 million kilograms, 20 million of which goes overseas.

(more…)

Crunch-time for dairy farming, beyond 2009, is just around the corner – mating, or getting cows in calf reports LIC. The success of this determines the production and profitability of the farming business into the future. Farmers want bulls proven to have traits desirable within their herds such as production, fertility, management and type, and to increase genetic gain; a poor decision at mating time can, according to one New Zealand farmer, be catastrophic.

Artificial insemination (AI) is, today, the choice of the majority of New Zealand dairy farmers because it enables farmers to get large numbers of cows in calf to bulls of high genetic merit and calve within a defined period of time. As farmer demand for AI has grown, artificial breeding (AB) companies have been offering an increasing smorgasbord of potential sires to farmers, however, bull selection criteria among AB companies differs as does the quality of the sire.

(more…)

A suite of measures is being worked on to tackle agricultural emissions – with no single tool likely to suit all farmers in all climatic and soil conditions. Some are available now, some are still in the laboratory. The spectrum ranges from greener on-farm practices (such as reduced fertiliser use, low methane forage crops, nutrient budgeting and no-till crop production) to high science including … drumroll please … the methane vaccine.

THE METHANE VACCINE It is early days and, naturally, there is no silver bullet, but a lot of store is being placed in efforts to develop a vaccine which limits the amount of methane produced in the rumen (the fore-stomach) of cows, deer and sheep during digestion.  “There’s still some way to go before we can say we have a vaccine,” says consortium manager Mark Aspin, “but the idea we could vaccinate our animals maybe once a year, or once a lifetime, and that would result in lower emissions is a pretty appealing approach. Aspin says a solution could be in farmers’ hands within seven years.

(more…)

It’s coming up to Holly Farm’s busy time. That’s not surprising. The lambing season is getting underway throughout the country and over the next few weeks the number of warm bodies on farms will more than double. But Holly Farm in the hills behind Marton is no ordinary farm reports The Dom Post. It is a romney stud and the farmers, David and Maureen Smith and son Cameron, go to great pains to ensure they record every foible of their newborn lambs and their mothers. It is a marked contrast to other commercial sheep farms where farmers leave ewes to give birth undisturbed. The hill country is not a place for weaklings who need to be mollycoddled and long gone are the days when farmers acted as midwives to their flocks.

But for the Smiths, record-keeping is paramount and the most important information is gleaned shortly after birth. It is the best way to discover which ewes and rams are performing well and which of their offspring are worth keeping to breed from. The best males are sold to hill- country farmers as producers of fertile, self-sufficient, fast-growing sheep. In a family tradition going back more than 120 years – Mr Smith has a cup awarded to his great-uncle, George Wheeler, in 1887 for a prize ram at the Manawatu and West Coast Agricultural and Pastoral Association show – they keep meticulous records and are able to trace their flock’s bloodlines back to the English romneys of Mr Wheeler’s Leedstown Stud.

(more…)

The cows at Wayne and Leeanne Taylor’s aren’t confined to a paddock. They are on the dining- room table (the tablecloth pattern is cows interspersed with bright yellow flowers) and cow-covered coasters sit in a rack down one end. Above, cows  dangle from a mobile reports the Taranaki Daily. Framed photos of  cows and paintings of cows line the  walls. Shelves in the lounge are covered  with cows of all shapes and sizes, a  couple of them with long eyelashes and  pretty frocks. The couple have been breeding Holstein Friesians for more than 20 years. Mr Taylor is vice president of the NZ Holstein Friesian Association and is a member of the Taranaki branch.

The couple have continued with Holstein Friesians because of the good production and good protein. “There is an advantage in the payout for milking black and whites.” The Taylors are 50/50 sharemilking 200 cows in Tikorangi and breeding is an “add on”. Their stud is called Muritai, which means sea breeze, and many of their cattle have names beginning with the letter W. Milking comes first, but the money from the breeding comes in handy when the payout is down. “I like the challenge involved [with the breeding] and look forward to the next generation of cows.” And he is happy they have now bred a bull good enough to go back into the system for the benefit of the New Zealand industry, he says.

(more…)

Sheep farmers will soon be able to identify the genetic merit of rams from the comfort of their office. SIL gave famers a glimpse of eSearch’s potential last month. It is an internet-based search tool similar to that already available in the beef cattle industry reports Country-wide. Now entering its final test phase, the eSearch development will provide sheep farmers better and faster access to genetic information. It is expected to be rolled out later this year and will also provide new ways to define the genetic merit of animals that fit with the differing commercial objectives of sheep farmers.

Farmers using eSearch will be able to customise their selection criteria. The search engine will identify those animals on the SIL-ACE database that will add to the net profit of their business. A searchable database of SIL-ACE evaluations will be updated every two months. The development has been made possible by the establishment in 2002 of the Alliance Central Progeny Test (CPT), making it possible to compare the genetic merit of animals across flocks and between breeds. The number of flocks and animals in the across-flock, across-breed genetic evaluation has doubled since the first SIL-ACE reports in 2004.

(more…)