Commercially Run

Bluestone Herefords has concentrated on providing a balanced bull with four main traits:

• Low Birthweight

• Short Gestation

• Calving Ease

• Dairy Beef Index

• Beef Heifer Index

• Homozygous polled, and

• Green Bull.

When buying Bluestone Hereford genetics as a bull, or semen you also benefit from the “white face advantage”. Within the dairy sector this enables you to more easily identify calves – ensuring you don’t wind up with a Beef X animal on the milking platform.

We are also highly committed to gathering accurate and meaningful data to ensure that objective information supports our genetic decisions. The herd is fully recorded with Breedplan (New Zealand Hereford) and the following measurements are taken:

• Birth weight (all calves are weighed at birth)

• Calving ease

• 200/400/600 day weights

• Mature cow weight

• Scanned for carcass traits including EMA & IMF.

All cattle are run in large management groups to accurately assess their performance against their contemporaries. Measurements which are interrelated gives more accuracy and reliability of the animals data for the purchaser. 

Bluestone Hereford herd is run in commercial conditions with all cows going onto the hill blocks for winter months and at times during summer months dependent on climatic conditions. No preferential treatment is given to any cow or heifer. 

Low Birth Weight

The lower the birthweight the potential for progeny to be lighter and will therefore lower the likelihood of a difficult birth. This not only assists with an easy calving, but also ensures calf survival at birth. This genetic trait has been a focus of Bluestone Herefords since the foundation of the stud in 2007.

Short Gestation

Short gestation is a trait which has many benefits to beef and dairy farmers. As a highly heritable trait of around 45% the financial and management benefits of short gestation are quickly seen:

• Tighter calving pattern – can also bring back those cows in third cycle and stopping them “falling out” of the herd

• More days in milk

• Increases the rebreeding recovery time (time between calving and mating) allowing a higher likelihood of getting in calf 

• Incremental benefit of improving earlier mating each season, by allowing more cows each season more days from calving to mating and earlier on platform

• Ideal for heifer mating to ensure post-calving the extended interval before mating will allow the time to gain condition to increase likelihood of conception

• For late cows it assists with bringing forward the calving date, providing greater returns from entering the milking platform earlier

• Reduces the risk of a dry young cow and therefore losing good genetics from the herd.

Calving Ease

Calving ease is one of the fundamental issues for dairy and beef farmers – we all want a live calf with no calving issues.  The value of having a live calf for sale plus a cow on the milking platform healthy and early means greater returns.

Dairy Beef Index

Developed by NZ Herefords specifically for the dairy sector, this sire selection tool is economically weighted to reflect dairy beef profitability with emphasis placed on calving ease and growth. The index has been developed using all the breeding values available to give a dollar value. It is aimed at a dairy beef market production target of a 475kg steer finished at 16 months. Any heifers can be on sold or for use in a self-replacing beef cow herd. The Dairy Beef index also puts focus on shorter gestation length bulls.

Beef Heifer Index

Estimates the genetic differences between animals in net profitability per mixed age dairy cow joined with all progeny destined for slaughter. Steers and heifer progeny target 550 kg live weight (300 kg carcase weight and 6 mm fat depth) at 24 months of age and at 475 kg live weight (260 kg carcase weight and 7 mm fat depth) at 22 months, respectively.

Homozygous Polled

Homozygous polled animals will ensure all resulting progeny are polled. Bluestone Herefords began testing for the homozygous polled gene in 2016 through the University of California in USA and more recently with Zoetis in New Zealand. This trait is ideal now given that pain relief for debudding is mandatory*.

* The costs of debudding/dehorning have increased with not only the cost for pain relief but as it is usually administered by a vet. There are also considerations from Health & Safety Act with the safety of all personnel working closely with horned cattle.

Green Bull

Over the last five years Bluestone Herefords have been working on the potential for improving the environmental impact of farming through beef genetics. We were aware of CRV programme to breed dairy bulls whose daughters have reduced urinary nitrogen. CRV use the concentration of urea nitrogen in milk (Milk Urea Nitrogen – MUN) as the predictor of urinary nitrogen because the MUN-Urinary Nitrogen relationship has been widely reported in scientific literature: high MUN translates to high Urinary Nitrogen.

We believe reducing urinary nitrogen is important because about 20% of nitrogen in urine ends up being leached into groundwater. Some also ends up as the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Recently, Lincoln University researchers have reported that cows with genetics for low MUN excrete less urinary nitrogen and that these low MUN cows have more nitrogen (protein) in their milk and faeces. MUN is obviously difficult to measure in beef cattle! But urea spreads quite evenly between three pools in the animals: milk, blood, and urine.  Blood Urea Nitrogen (BUN) levels are expected to give the same information as MUN levels. Therefore, we began monitoring the concentration of urea nitrogen in blood (Blood Urea Nitrogen – BUN) of Bluestone cattle, and then performed a genetic analysis. 

To date the data we have from our monitoring  indicates that animals do differ genetically for BUN.  This suggests that breeding with low BUN animals will produce low BUN progeny, which should excrete less urinary nitrogen. Further of interest was the finding that animals with breeding values that are low for BUN tend to have higher breeding values for 400-day, 600-day and maternal liveweight traits. This suggests that animals with low BUN may be partitioning dietary nitrogen from the urea pools (milk, blood, and urine) and into growth which is a win-win.

This year we are marketing bulls whose breeding values for BUN are significantly below average and these are identified in the catalogue. We are now including BUN as a key part of our breeding programme.

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