On our 3rd day, we traveled to Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC) bright and early to watch them collect semen. Yep, you read that right. We watched someone collect semen while in Hamilton and I loved every second of it.
New Zealand is, currently, the only country that sells fresh, sexed semen, mainly because they are such a small country and LIC has a corner on that market. LIC is a co-op (you have to own shares in the company to buy their products), owned by over 12,000 of New Zealand's dairy farmers and was established over 50 years ago.
There are 3 main differences between LIC and the genetics side of U.S. agriculture:
1) Obviously, the marketing of fresh semen is one of them, since most of the U.S. uses frozen semen.
2) When a farmer buys semen from LIC, they are buying a specific "team" of bulls. LIC's teams consist of 10 "proven" bulls, meaning these bulls have gone through extensive genetic testing and have sired around 80-100 daughters to show that his progeny can produce the desired amount of milk solids. You can actually visit LIC's webpage here and check out their stats on their bull teams for this spring.
3) LIC handles everything about the semen from the testicle to the uterus. Meaning they collect the semen, they process it, they ship it, and they have qualified techs that inseminate the cow with that semen. This approach is definitely necessary to prevent inbreeding since you purchase a team, rather a specific bull's semen. The AI techs use a Datamate, which they punch in the information of the cow they are about to inseminate and the information of the semen they are using, to ensure that a cow is not inseminated with her own sire's semen.
Dave, our tour guide for the morning.
The bull sniffing out the teaser bull. They use pheromones to encourage the bulls to mount the teaser bull, then they collect the semen.
We spent the rest of our day visiting 2 distinctly different dairy farms.
In New Zealand they use a number system to classify their dairy farms, System 1 being a low input system where the cows are all fed on the farmer's own pasture and System 5 being a high input system where almost half of the feedstuffs are imported year round.
First, we stopped at Pete Morgan and Ann Bouma's farm which is classified as a System 1 farm. Pete grew up in South Auckland with no farming background at all. In New Zealand, no one really inherits a farm. It is a progression where you start milking for a farmer, then work your way up to sharemilking (just like sharecropping), to eventually buying the farm. It took Pete and Ann about 8 years to buy Morlands Dairy Farm from her parents. Now they milk 530 cows once a day, all season long.
Pete and Ann prefer low input because as Pete put it, they "work to live, not live to work". It works for them because they want to be able to milk in the morning, then take the rest of the day to spend with their family and do other things that they love like hiking or going to the beach.
The mentality is very different, because many of us live to farm. We give up a lot of things to put our farm and livestock first, because it requires most of our time and attention. I don't know if I could honestly tell you which mentality is the healthier one. I've seen several men work themselves to death on their farm, but they wouldn't have it any other way, because that is their heart and soul. While their farm is definitely a priority, Pete and Ann just have other priorities that they put ahead of their farm. This definitely made me think a little about the mindset that I grew up with and question how my own priorities and goals compared to the lifestyle that I want to live in the future.
This is the view that Pete and Ann have from their back deck. I definitely would not complain waking up to this every morning.
Pete and Ann's house and yes, that is a pool. We found that it was actually pretty common for a Kiwi farmer to have a pool or tennis court in their backyard.
We, then, spent our afternoon with Dave Swney, whose farm is classified as a System 5 dairy farmer. Dave contract milks with his parents, meaning he milks the cows and does most of the labor for a certain rate per kilograms of milk solids. New Zealand dairy farmers, unlike American dairy farmers, are not paid based on the amount of milk they produce. Most of New Zealand's milk is dried into milk powder before it is exported to Asia, which means they get paid on how many milk solids per kilograms they produce. Milk solids are the protein and fat in the milk.
Next, we stopped at Monavale Blueberries, an organic blueberry farm outside of Cambridge. This is where we met Richard, who I am convinced is one of the happiest men alive right now, but if I had his job I think I'd be pretty happy about life too. Monavale is a family business, that Richard's father-in-law began after immigrating from Holland back in the 1970's. Monavale grows 22 varieties of blueberries on 100 acres and during harvest they produce over 5 tonnes per day. Fun Fact: They produce more blueberries a day, than all of New Zealand can eat in a week, so they export a lot of their produce to Australia.
Richard just loving life at Monavale.
By far some of the best blueberries I have ever had.
Had to get some of Monavale's homemade blueberry ice cream on the way out and it was by far one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life.
We ended the night with drinks and pizza at Digger's, then ran across the street to have a few more drinks at Honky-Tonk Bar, which was basically New Zealand's version of an American country bar. Needless to say, our big group of farm kids from America had a pretty good time, some more than others.
Still got about 10 more days to go!
Night y'all!
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