Blog Post #4 – Your Wingman

Wingman

The weather was substandard to say the least when I pulled up at Kevin and Nicole’s runoff to catch up with Kevin and check out their cows. It was a rainy old day with squally showers blasting through – just the sort of thing you’d expect when you’re 450m above sea level!

After being stoked with the Wingman Warrant of Fitness we did on their herd as a part of the Milking It 2.0 project, Kevin and Nicole decided to push the boat out and keep us involved to help them build a herd they could be proud of.

So despite it not being the best day for cow photos or wandering among them, Kevin and I sat in the ute for an hour looking at them behind the break fence from a vantage point on the hill. Just looking, yarning about the farm, their farm system, ‘Sausage Cows’, and other farming-related things. It’s amazing what you see when you take the time to just ‘look’ at cows and watch what they’re doing. Out popped cow 543 – F10J6, 490kg LWT, full of capacity and a little ripper who did 540kg/MS last season! “I reckon that’s your cow” I said to Kevin, and we spent the next 15 minutes discussing what 543 and other cows like her offered Kevin and Nicole’s farm and farm system.

We made it out of the paddock without me having to get out and push (which would have been fairly untidy to say the least), and headed back to the house for a debrief, a coffee and some ginger loaf! Out came the laptop, notebook and bull catalogues and we proceeded to spend the next 2 hours talking ‘Ideal Cow’, sire selection, balancing bull teams, and using MINDA data to test our theories on.

Given Kevin and Nicole’s farm is a forestry conversion, there are some challenges with contour and the pasture growth curve that needed to be taken into account when looking at the ‘Ideal Cow’ for their system. Sometimes the ‘Ideal Cow’ that the data suggests is not actually the ‘Ideal Cow’ that the farmer wants to milk! All of these things have to be balanced out against the farm system and proposed level of inputs.

We concurred that there was an ‘oppertunity’ to reduce liveweight of the larger cows in the herd, and put some sire selection pressure on the key TOP traits of Udders, Capacity and Rump Width, and use these to help drive PW and efficiency in their herd. My homework was to put together 2 bull teams for Kevin and Nicole – a ‘within catalogue’ bull team, and an ‘across catalogue’ bull team, giving them the choice as to where the next generation of heifer replacement sires would come from. Challenge accepted!

I drove down the driveway heading home with a touch of the ‘warm fuzzies’, thinking to myself how bloody lucky I was to be involved with people like Kevin, Nicole and the crew at DWN. Thank you for having me on board and for your support – bring on mating 2025!