Christmas joy: Jo and Bryan Dickson with their daughters Jacque (left) and Rachel. Picture: Andy Rogers
It might be August but Christmas sure brought joy for one southwest Victorian couple on Monday.
Bryan and Jo Dickson from Terang learnt on Monday that their bull — called Christmas — had topped the Australian Breeding Values Holstein proven Balanced Performance Index.
A rise from the number three position in April, it was a dream come true for Bryan.
“It is something I have always dreamt about but never thought we would do it,” he said. “It’s not very easy, (and) we are happy, really happy.”
Until now, Christmas’ ranking in April — at number three — was the highest the Emu Banks herd at Terang had achieved in a public list.
Bryan and Jo no longer own the bull, but they have up to seven Christmas daughters milking, another 30 to 40 heifers and plans to use him across 25 per cent of their 900-strong milking herd this year.
Monday was the second release of Australia’s three new breeding indexes, the Balanced Performance Index — the most widely used index and is a combination of production, type and health traits for maximum profit — the Health Weighted Index and Type Weighted Index.
Australian Dairy Herd Improvement Scheme general manager Daniel Abernethy said this release would be the first time a lot of spring calving dairy operations would see the material associated with the new indexes as they would not have required semen in April.
He said it was still early days in terms of what impact the indexes would have on bull selection.
However, he expected, in time, there would be quite a lot of difference between bulls at the top of each index as sires were bred to match the different requirements.
Bull rankings change based on extra data that has been entered into the system, which has always impacted rankings, according to Mr Abernethy.
But he said extra data about one aspect, fertility for example, would have more of an impact on the ranking of a bull in the index which placed more emphasis on health traits.
Mr Abernethy said the feedback since the first release of the new breeding indexes was that the BPI was the most used by dairy farmers.
Source: Weekly Times
