In 1997, Bruno Jubinville couldn’t order coffee in English — but he could read a cow. Today, his balance‑first gospel is shaping barns from Quebec to Brazil.
The Purina truck was still running when Bruno Jubinville walked into the barn.
He wasn’t there to evaluate cows. He was dropping off bags of heifer feed — a fill-in job after the Master Breeder herd he’d worked at for nine years had dispersed. But the Holstein Canada classification crew had just wrapped up their visit, and the classifiers were still hanging around when Bruno came through with his delivery.
One of them — half joking, half challenging, the way dairy people do across barn aisles everywhere — turned to him. “How many points would you give those cows?”
Bruno glanced at the animals. He said it for the laugh, he’d later recall. “87, 86.”
Both scores matched exactly what the official classifiers had just recorded.
Within a week, Holstein Canada was on the phone. They needed a French-speaking classifier from Quebec. There was just one hitch. Bruno Jubinville didn’t speak a word of English.
Not one.
That was April 1997. He wouldn’t leave Holstein Canada for nearly twenty-nine years.
Concrete Foundations and Cow Foundations
Bruno grew up in Coaticook, a small agricultural town in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, about twenty minutes from the Vermont border. It’s deep agricultural country — the kind of place where kids absorb the rhythms of dairy whether they mean to or not.
By twelve or thirteen, he was doing summer work on local farms — not purebred operations, just regular hay-season labour that puts calluses on your hands before your voice changes. After school, he crossed the border to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he poured concrete foundations for houses. Hard, physical, good money.
But family reasons brought him back to Quebec, where he landed at Chacook Holstein — a Master Breeder herd where he’d spend the next eight or nine years doing something he never planned on: learning to read cattle.
“I learned everything there,” he says. “They were really good cowmen. They bought lots of cows, we sold them, and I learned a lot.”
No animal science degree. Nine years in a barn where the standard was Master Breeder or nothing — watching, handling, studying cows that had to be right. That’s probably the credential that matters most.
When Chacook herd was sold, Bruno took the Purina delivery job. Supposed to be temporary.
Turned out to be a runway.
“Chantal Translated for Me. They Gave Me the Job.”
After that barn-floor audition — truck still idling outside — things moved fast.
Holstein Canada needed a Quebec-based classifier, and Bruno was invited to a formal evaluation: score six cows in front of a board with senior staff and veteran classifiers. He drove there with Chantal Chalette, a perfectly bilingual colleague who’d been asked to come along for a very practical reason.
Bruno’s English was, by his own admission, “zero.”
Every time the board asked a question, Chantal translated. Every time Bruno gave his assessment, she relayed it back. At the end, she turned to him with a line that belongs in a movie: “I translated for you. They’re going to give you the job.”
Bruno wasn’t so sure. That night, the phone rang for both of them at the same time. He was in.
He spent his first two or three years classifying across Canadian provinces without being able to communicate directly with English-speaking breeders. He’d walk in, evaluate the cows, give the final score, and leave. The numbers did the talking.
But it gnawed at him.
“I said to Jay Shannon, I would like to have an English course,” Bruno recalls, “because I want to understand the people who speak English. I want to work with them better and understand what they do.”
He took the course. Think about that. Nobody asked him to. Nobody expected it. A guy already proving he could do the job across multiple provinces just decided the numbers weren’t enough — he wanted to connect with the breeders he served.
Sixty Cows a Day and the Dark Alberta Roads
Here’s something people outside the classification world don’t appreciate — what the job actually looks like, week in, week out.
You leave home on Monday morning. Early. If the first farm is five hours away, you’re scoring cows by 1:30 in the afternoon. If it’s closer, maybe 10 AM. Four to six herds a day. Around sixty cows. Some breeders want you there at 4 AM so the udders are full. Others are fine with 7. You try to finish by five. You don’t always.
The work itself is quieter than people think. You stand behind the cow. You read the rear legs — the set, the angle, the way she carries weight. You note the udder floor, the fore attachment, and the teat placement. You assess the loin width, the body depth, and the spring of the rib. Sixty times a day, five days a week. The good classifiers see it in seconds. The great ones see what it’ll look like in three lactations.
Then the phone calls. Monday nights, Tuesday nights, lunch breaks — you’re scheduling next week’s visits while still grinding through this week’s.
“It’s really, really important to give a good service to the breeder,” Bruno says. “And those team members are really, really passionate about what they’re doing. You need to be. Because you’re always by yourself on the road.”
The isolation is the part nobody talks about. Some nights, you come back to a hotel room after a breeder was unhappy with a score, and you sit with that alone. No colleague to debrief with. No team dinner. Just you, the ceiling, and the knowledge that you’ll do it all again at 7 AM.
And those Alberta winters in the late ’90s — before GPS was standard, classifiers navigated by written directions. Drive five miles, turn at the barn with the blue roof, look for the light. Six miles into the darkness without one? You’re lost.
“In BC, you score more cows per day. In Quebec or Ontario, more herds, fewer cows per stop,” Bruno explains. The geography shaped the grind differently across provinces. The grind was constant everywhere.
Five days a week. Every week. For twenty-nine years. In 1997, punching linear scores into an early handheld that was basically a glorified calculator. By 2021, doing it on Connexxion.
Tom Showed Him the Passion
Ask Bruno who shaped him, and three names come up right away: André Tardif, Gilbert, and Tom.
“André Tardif showed me to be professional — always — when I’m doing my job,” Bruno says. “Gilbert hired me. And Tom — Tom showed me the passion. He transferred to me his passion.”
Tom Byers. Thirty years at Holstein Canada — eventually rising to Head Classifier — he was originally from Scotland and classified more than 300,000 cows over his career. The Bullvine profiled Tom years ago, and if you know his work, you see his fingerprints all over Bruno’s approach — the emphasis on education, the refusal to let a final score substitute for actual understanding of an animal.
Bruno absorbed Tom’s philosophy completely. When he started doing international workshops for the World Holstein Friesian Federation, Bruno ranked second among the presenters his very first time out — a performance he credits directly to what Tom taught him.
Here’s the thing Tom drilled into him — the insight that became the backbone of Bruno’s entire professional worldview. “At the end, I don’t think the final score is really important,” Bruno says. “It’s the linear code. Every country, when they look at our genetics, they work with our linear codes — not with the final score.”
The score is for the breeder’s wall. The linear traits are for the breed’s future. If you’ve ever wondered why the classification number everyone obsesses over isn’t actually the data that moves the needle on genetic progress, there it is, straight from a man who spent three decades inside the system.
Friday at 7 AM. Two 97s. One Weekend to Madison.
In Holstein history, Canada has had 11 cows that scored 97 points. Bruno participated in classifying eight of them.
He rattles off the names the way other people name their kids: James Rose, Kendra, Hailey, Shakira — and then beyond the Holsteins, Gorgeous the Jersey, Brown Heaven Fantasy the Brown Swiss, and the Ayrshire, View Village Gentleman Joy. Each one carries a memory so vivid you can practically feel the barn humidity in his voice.
The morning that sticks out the most is a Friday at 7 AM at Pierre Boulet’s farm. Bruno and his colleague Daniel were there, and two cows — Thrulane James Rose and Bruynland Strom Kendra — both scored 97 on the same visit.
“We were really nervous,” Bruno recalls, “because we scored 97 for two of them, and that put a lot of pressure on us.”
Both cows left that same weekend for Madison — World Dairy Expo. Rose, who was actually sick and resting when people were debating which cow deserved what, would go on to change the direction of the show ring itself.
“Rose was really ahead of the breed at that time,” Bruno says. “She changed the show. Smaller cows, a little bit. Before, it was all Logic — the Duke, so big and tall and long. Then Rose arrived.”
And Bruno was right there at the inflection point, clipboard in hand.
When you ask him which 97 was the most complete, he doesn’t hesitate. “Shakira. She was the most complete 97 I scored. On her legs, mammary, dairy strength — I would like to see the rib structure just a tiny bit more. But she’s the most complete.”
Then he says the quiet part out loud — the thing that reveals how a great classifier actually thinks: “We need to understand — 97 points is not perfect. All of them have a little defect. All of them.”
He walks through the others with the reverence of a man who knows he’ll never see their like again. Vandenberg Amedeo Gorgeous — the Jersey — was a tank, the widest udder he’d ever laid eyes on. Hailey walked like a princess, so stylish that “when she arrived on the ring, nobody was talking.” And View Village Gentleman Joy — an Ayrshire he first scored as an 88 in first lactation, then 97 in a later round — remains “really special.”
His eye worked across breeds, not just Holsteins. He classified Brown Heaven Fantasy to 97 as a Brown Swiss, and scored another Brown Swiss — Iroquois Acres Jong Cali at Lookout Farm — to 97 alongside colleague Chantal Chalette. He also classified Goldwyn’s 1,000th Excellent daughter in Canada — Donar Pally Jo Goldwyn EX-90, a fourth-lactation cow with over 53,000 kg lifetime production at the time, bred and owned by Dorothea Beier and Horst Schulz in St. Cyrille, Quebec.
The Gospel of Balance
If there’s one word Bruno would stitch into the coveralls of every dairy farmer on the planet, it’s balance.
His favourite way of explaining it involves a football player he sat beside on a flight home from British Columbia. The guy was about 6’2″, over 300 pounds — a lineman who passed the ball to the quarterback. In the airplane seat, he looked enormous. Uncomfortable. Too big for the space.
“But when he started to walk at the airport, he was really functional,” Bruno says. “Strong and wide. The problem wasn’t that he was too big. The problem was that the seat was too small.”
Then the pivot: “That means every cow doesn’t fit everywhere. It depends on what kind of barn you have, what kind of installation you’ve got. Not every bull fits everywhere. Not every cow fits everywhere.”
It challenges a tendency that persisted in dairy breeding for generations — the pursuit of extremes. Extreme stature. Extreme frame. Extreme openness. Bruno watched that trend come, peak, and — finally — start to recede.
“When I started classifying, we’d sometimes finish herds at a 72 or 73 average,” he says. “Now we don’t see that anymore. It’s hard to find a heifer at 75 or 76. Most are 80 and over. We’re on the right path. I’m really, really happy about that.”
Walk into almost any Canadian herd today, and the spread among two-year-olds is maybe five or six points. That was unthinkable when he started. The consistency of modern cattle — driven by decades of genetic progress and the classification system’s increasing focus on functional traits — is something Bruno considers a genuine triumph.
But there’s a caveat, and it’s a big one.
The breed is now calving heifers at 22 to 24 months. Some of those heifers are milking 40 to 45 kilograms a day in first lactation. “It’s really hard for them,” Bruno says. “When a heifer is producing 45 kilos, the energy she needs — she’s running a marathon every day. She needs something behind her to produce and still stay in the barn.”
That “something behind her” is structural balance — the legs, the loin, the feet, the udder attachments that let a cow absorb the punishment of high early production and come back for second, third, fourth lactation. Without it, she’s a one-lactation wonder. And the industry can’t afford one-lactation wonders — not at today’s replacement costs.
His international presentations carried titles that doubled as manifestos — The Symmetry of a Cow and The Secret of Balance. Same message, delivered in barns from Southern Alberta to Cremona, Italy: you can have all the genetics in the world, but if the cow can’t stand on her feet and hold her frame together, the genetics don’t matter.
He’s got a dozen versions of the same teaching story, too. One breeder told him flat out: “I don’t like type. I don’t like type.” Bruno scored the herd — 81, 82, nothing special. Then he scored one cow 85. The breeder pointed right at her: “She’s my best. She gives lots of milk.” Bruno just smiled. “Yeah. But this is the type, you know.”
Locomotion: “My Baby”
If there’s one trait Bruno claims personal ownership of in the Canadian classification program, it’s locomotion.
“I always, always pushed to have locomotion,” he says. “For a long, long time. It was my goal before I left, to have locomotion evaluated. Because I think it’s really, really important.”
Canada’s challenge was unique. With a large proportion of tie-stall barns — particularly in Quebec — locomotion was harder to evaluate and harder to weigh properly compared to countries where cows walk an hour or more to the milking parlor every single day.
But Bruno’s international work opened his eyes to how critical the trait is once you step outside a tie-stall reality. In the Azores, cows walk through steep volcanic hills for one to two hours daily to reach the parlor. In New Zealand, they’re outside 99% of the time. And in England? The economic weighting on locomotion is enormous — because the data proves better-moving cows make more money.
“In England, the weighting of locomotion is really, really high,” Bruno explains. “They have numbers behind numbers. I mean money. When you have good locomotion, your cows make more money.”
He and colleague Jill Nelson developed a locomotion scoring video — a visual training tool scored on a 1-to-9 scale — that went out to classifiers across the country. It was one of the tangible tools Bruno left behind when he moved on.
Within Canada’s system, the three most important components for feet and legs are heel depth, side view of the rear legs, and rear leg rear view — all feeding into locomotion assessment. “I think we’re pretty good now,” he says. “I’m really happy.”
Getting Ten Countries to Agree on What a 7 Means
Classification harmonization — getting ten countries to agree on what a 7 for rear leg rear view actually means — sounds bureaucratic until you realize it determines which Canadian bulls get used in Colombia. Bruno sat on the WHFF Type Harmonization Working Group alongside representatives from the United States, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and New Zealand, meeting at international workshops to work through the painstaking details of making classification data comparable across borders. When he couldn’t make the most recent session in Cremona — he was sick — Carolin Turner stepped in. When semen from Canadian bulls flows to dozens of countries, and buyers in Brazil or Australia rely on Canadian linear data to make purchasing decisions, this harmonization work has real economic consequences.
Bruno also took the Canadian classification system directly to Colombia, running training courses for local classifiers. He worked across Australia, Brazil, and numerous other countries. And he wasn’t just exporting a system — he was learning.
“Every time, I love everywhere,” he says. “It’s so incredible how people like Canadian cows, how they like what we’re doing. They listen a lot, and they learn with us — and we learn too.”
Carolin Turner served as his co-coordinator for years at Holstein Canada, and when the CEO named Brad Eggink as Classification Manager back in 2017, he singled out Bruno and Carolin as “key leaders of our dedicated Classification Team” who would “take our Classification program to the next level.” That kind of endorsement doesn’t come from punching a clock.
But Bruno pushes back on the nationalism that sometimes creeps into breeding conversations. “We talk about Canadian kind, Canadian kind. But I think everybody, every herd in the world, needs the same cows. Balance. This is where we are. The breeding is all around the world now.”
Still, when he sees balanced, functional cattle abroad, something sneaks in. “In my head, I always say, ‘This is a Canadian cow.’ I don’t know why. But it’s like — balance. We talk about balance.”
The Genomics Question
When genomic testing arrived, fear swept through the classification world. Bruno remembers it clearly.
“Classifiers were scared,” he says. “They said, ‘Genomics will take our jobs.’ People were saying we don’t need classification anymore.”
If you can predict a cow’s type traits from a DNA sample, why send a human to her barn? It wasn’t an unreasonable question. A lot of people in the industry were asking it.
Bruno’s answer is pragmatic: “Genomics is one of the best tools we’ve ever had. But it’s one tool in a box of tools. If genomics is so important, we need classification to prove the numbers. To improve reliability. You need classification.”
Tom Byers made the same point years earlier. “Any progress we’ve made is through classification and milk recording,” Tom shared in a 2018 interview. “Genomics wouldn’t exist without them.” Bruno and Tom — mentor and protégé — singing from the same hymnal on this one.
And they’re right. Genomic predictions are only as good as the phenotypic data they’re trained on. Without ongoing classification — without actual people evaluating actual cows — the reference population powering those predictions stagnates. Reliability drops. Breeding decisions get worse.
The proof is already showing up. Some genetic operations now have five, six, or seven generations with no classification or milk recording. The validation gap is growing. And the industry relying on those numbers hasn’t fully reckoned with what that means.
“When genomics arrived, some people totally forgot about family,” Bruno says. “They forgot about cow families. We always talk about bulls, bulls, bulls. But we need to talk about females. Both. We need both to improve the breed.”
That position has gained real traction lately, especially as breeders have seen genomic overreliance produce its own set of disappointments — bulls whose daughters don’t match the predictions, and cow families that fall apart after one flashy generation. The Bullvine’s own recent reporting on inbreeding trends and the Blondin Sires approach to deep-pedigree sire selection underscores just how relevant this concern has become. The pendulum is swinging back. Slowly.
First Out the Door With Connexxion
When Holstein Canada launched Connexxion in April 2021 — the new on-farm digital platform replacing a system in use since 2005 — they didn’t send a junior classifier to the debut. They sent Bruno. He headed to Peartome Holsteins for the first official classification visit using the new technology.
Classic Bruno. He asked for English courses when nobody expected him to. He championed locomotion when the tie-stall lobby pushed back. He adopted new tech when it improved service delivery. The thread connecting all of it? Whatever helps the breeder, do it.
Sandra at Véronamour, a brand-new Holstein Canada member when Bruno showed up for one of her early classification visits back in 2012, put it: “He provided us with so much information — he took the time to define each trait, the ideal traits that we should strive for in each animal, and why. It was a very informative visit for me; I use the information every day.”
That was fourteen years ago. The approach never changed.
The Part of the Cow Nobody Talks About
Before the interview wrapped, Bruno circled back to the thing he really wanted to say — the technical detail closest to his heart.
“Some countries still don’t evaluate loin,” he says, “but for me, it’s one of the most important parts of the cow.”
Most breeders think of the loin as the curvature of the topline. Bruno defines it differently. The loin — those vertebrae on top — needs to be strong and wide, side to side, because it supports the internal angle of the reproductive cavity. A strong loin keeps the fertility system at the proper angle. In the first lactation, you won’t notice a problem. But as a cow ages, a weak loin shifts that cavity angle, making her harder to breed, and shortens her productive life.
“We need to check inside the cow,” Bruno says. “When you look at a cow, not just outside. If she’s got a good loin, you can see that the internal angle of the cavity and the fertility system is right. This is why it’s so important for me.”
And then he delivers a line that might be the most provocative thing he said in the whole conversation: “I think the genetic potential is higher than what breeders can use right now because of management level. The genetics are pretty, pretty high now. I can’t imagine in the future we’ll have significantly better cows than this.”
He’s not saying we’ve hit the ceiling of genetic progress. He’s saying the gap between what genetics can deliver and what management practices currently capture is the real frontier. The cows are ready. The barns — the protocols, the transition management, the foot care, the facilities — aren’t always keeping up.
The Math That Makes Balance Pay
Bruno’s argument for balance and longevity isn’t just philosophical. Run the numbers, and it snaps into sharp focus.
Canada’s national average is roughly 2.5 to 2.7 lactations. At current replacement costs — CA$3,000 to $3,500 for a springing heifer — every additional lactation a cow completes is worth roughly $1,500 to $2,000 in avoided replacement cost alone, before you even count the peak production she gives in lactations three and four.
Here’s the math: push your herd from 2.7 to 3.5 average lactations on 100 cows — that’s 80 additional cow-lactations at roughly $1,750 in avoided replacement cost each. Call it $140,000.
That’s your robot payment. That’s your barn renovation. That’s the difference between scraping by and building equity.
And classification — the system Bruno championed for nearly three decades — exists for exactly this reason: to identify and reward the structural traits that let a cow last.
“After one hundred years of classification,” he says, “people still don’t know enough about why we classify. The program is built for two things: longevity and productivity. That’s the goal.”
“I Never Want to Stop Working With Cows”
After twenty-nine years at Holstein Canada — rising from field classifier to Manager of On-Farm Operations — Bruno made the move that surprised half the industry and made perfect sense to the other half. He joined Blondin Sires.
Not as a salesman. As an ambassador.
“I don’t want to sell semen,” he says bluntly. “I’m not a salesman. My role will be to educate people. What is a good cow? What is a balanced cow?”
The fit makes sense. Blondin Sires — owned by Simon Lalande, Dann Brady, and Nicolas Lalande out of St. Placide, Quebec — is built on exactly the philosophy Bruno has been preaching for three decades: deep pedigrees, functional type, and cow families you can actually trace back through generations of real milk records. Dann Brady co-founded Blondin Sires in part because he couldn’t find bulls backed by the kind of documented maternal lines he wanted in the major AI catalogues. That’s Bruno’s language. That’s balance.
“With my twenty-nine years,” Bruno says, “this is what I want to give — more follow-up to the breeders, more help with the breeding they do. Because it’s an investment, it’s really, really important.”
“It was hard for me to make the decision to leave, because I really love the team I work with,” he admits. That team — Carolin Turner and the classifiers he’d trained and mentored across every province — had been his professional family for the better part of three decades. Walking away from that takes a different kind of courage than walking into a barn at 4 AM.
But he’s got strong teammates at Blondin. Brian Carscadden, the Executive Senior Manager who brought more than 25 years of international sire analyst experience to the role, is deeply involved in the company’s growth strategy. And Dann Brady may have spent more time studying pedigrees and cow families than anyone in the Canadian industry — the kind of person Bruno can learn from while bringing his own three decades of type evaluation to the table.
“I still learn a lot about bulls and so many numbers,” Bruno says. “But I think it’s really important to help breeders with what they really need in the field. This is what I want to do.”
Still Learning
There’s a photograph floating around social media of Bruno at Mapleburn Farms during a classification visit. In the background, the farm kids are drawing cows on paper while he works.
That image says more than any career summary could.
“If we explain to them when they’re young,” Bruno says, “they will know in the future, when they’re on the farm, how important it is to have balanced cows and balanced herds. Because longevity — it’s the clue of the future.”
Bruno Jubinville spent his career inside one of Canada’s most important dairy industry programs. He scored eight of the eleven highest-classified cows in the country’s history. He pushed for locomotion when it wasn’t fashionable. He took the Canadian system to Colombia, to Brazil, to Cremona, and brought lessons home every time. He was the first to use Connexxion, the first classifier from Quebec to ask for English courses, and one of the last people you’d ever catch bragging about any of it.
“I never expected you would do an article on me like this, you know?” he says near the end of the conversation.
Twenty-nine years. Eight 97-point cows. A dozen countries. One word — balance — repeated so consistently that it became a career.
At Blondin, the barns are different. The conversations have shifted from linear scores to mating decisions. But the message won’t change. It hasn’t changed in three decades. It won’t start now.
Balance. Longevity. Respect the breeder. Love the cow.
And keep learning. Every single day.
Key Takeaways
- A “joke” score from behind a feed truck turned into 29 years of classification, eight EX‑97 cows, and one of the most influential “eyes” in Canadian Holsteins.
- Bruno’s bottom line: balance pays. Cows that last 3.5 lactations instead of 2.7 can put roughly $140,000 back into a 100‑cow herd in avoided replacements.
- He helped drag locomotion, loin strength, and functional udders from the margins into the middle of the scorecard — exactly what 2025 robot barns and high‑yield fresh cows need.
- Genomics, in his view, is just one tool in the box; without ongoing classification and cow-family data, the predictions drift, and inbreeding problems snowball.
- At Blondin Sires, he’s taking that “classifier brain” straight into sire selection, focusing on deep cow families and balanced type instead of chasing the latest genomic rocket.
Continue the Story
- TOM BYERS: “THAT’S CLASSIFIED!” – Tom didn’t just hire Bruno; he transferred a passion that defined nearly thirty years of service. This profile of the legendary Head Classifier explores a parallel journey spent proving that “cow sense” remains the essential partner to industry science.
- Ed Bos Picked the Same Traits for 50 Years. A Million-Cow Study Just Proved He Was Right – While Bruno preached the gospel of balance in the barn, the data was quietly catching up. This deep-dive proves the structural traits Bruno prioritized for decades are the literal foundation of a farm’s financial survival.
- Blondin Sires: Putting the Emphasis Back on Great Type and Deep Pedigrees – Bruno’s move to Blondin isn’t a retirement, but a strategic pivot toward an industry shift. Discover how this AI powerhouse is reclaiming the deep-pedigree philosophy Bruno spent his career protecting for the next generation.
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