Wanted: most efficient feed convertors

A trial run in New Zealand by DairyNZ is seeking cows that are the most efficient converters of feed to milk. Scientists say within a year they should be able to confirm a genetic marker can clearly identify such high performing animals.

The trial is being carried out at the Westpac Taranaki Agricultural Research Station (WTARS) at Hawera in conjunction with LIC and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise with funding from the Ministry of Science and Innovation and DairyNZ.
It is being replicated in Australia under the auspices of the Department of Primary Industry in Victoria. The results of both trials will be combined to ensure sufficient scale to confirm the validity of results.
The trial started in 2008 with a special facility built at the research station. This consisted of 28 pens and feed stations for the 224 calves on the facility at any one time.
Kevin Macdonald, DairyNZ's senior scientist, has been supervising the trial.
"Initially we put calves that were between six and eight months of age through the pens for 60 days. We measured their live weight and their intake for 46 days and identified which were the most efficient and which were the least efficient. All told we put through about 1050 calves, and we've kept the 10% most efficient and the 10% that are least efficient," he says.
From the differences found between calves, LIC identified a likely set of gene markers for feed conversion efficiency (FCE). The markers were used to screen 3700 cows from commercial herds and 214 cows were bought as either efficient or inefficient.
Macdonald says they are now feeding the cows in the pens with the objective of validating the marker genes by conducting the same test. The feed intake, live weight and milk production are measured for 35 days. -Dairy News

Work enables billion dollar industry

Olive Castle was a Mathematician who joined the NZ Dairy Board in the 1940s, who worked largely behind the scenes but whose work enabled a scheme which has generated billions of dollars to the New Zealand dairy industry and the country’s economy. 

Her contribution is recorded in a book that will be launched by dairy farmer cooperative, LIC, in Hamilton on 14 March 2012.

Author of ‘The Billion Dollar Scheme’ and LIC Communications Manager, Clare Bayly, said that acknowledging Olive’s contribution was a very important component of the book.

“We had to make this happen.  Olive was a ‘creature of the times’, a woman working in a male environment, a conceptual thinker who worked behind the scenes and solved a dilemma which enabled dairy sires to be accurately evaluated.

“Colleagues recall that she never sought the limelight however and, whereas today, she would seek to have her work published, in those days she ‘just got on’ with the next task at hand.  It therefore became important, when putting this book together, to ensure that her contribution was acknowledged, to avoid it fading into the mists of time.”


Bayly said The Billion Dollar Scheme is dedicated to five very special people who devoted their lives to improving the profitability and sustainability of dairy farming and whose work enabled the LIC Sire Proving Scheme. Those people are Olive Castle, Sir Arthur Ward OBE, Dr Patrick Shannon QSO, Jeff Stichbury and Harvey Tempero.