Holstein World:  Jersey Canada currently offers a recordation program for crossbred animals from a known Jersey sire or with Jersey breed characteristics.  What percent of your current animals recorded are crossbred?  Do you see this number increasing in the future?

Russell Gammon:  While there has been some increase in the number of recordations we process for crossbred animals in the last five years, we’re still under one percent of our total volume for such animals.  We assume the cross is made primarily for calving ease.  One of the domestic AI companies has had a program where a cocktail of semen is “mixed” containing Holstein, Jersey and Polled Hereford semen. The mixture is used to help get problem breeders in calf. We’ve picked up a few Jersey-sired animals form this program. If producers plan on going a Jersey route we’ll see more of this activity.

We are quite unlike the USA where Jersey semen sales have more than doubled to over 1.3 million doses sold domestically in 2005. Much of that increase has to be going into cattle of breeds other than Jersey even though the breed is “going great guns” in the US. Frankly, we’re not planning for a major influx of recordation from this kind of source.

A much better option would be more Jersey embryos implanted in animals of other breeds for both trouble-free calving and dairy producers being introduced to the wonders of “the real deal” –productive, high solids, easy to manage Jerseys!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 9:10 am by sschmidt and is filed under Guest Blogger Series. Hits for this post:1310 You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.