Dear Subscriber First Name,

The weather is not playing ball as spring calving gets into gear and we prepare ourselves and our farm teams for the calving marathon.  For many of you land is waterlogged, and quality feed is in short supply. Amongst these challenges, it’s been encouraging to hear Jersey farmers say their cows aren’t pugging the paddocks as much as other breeds and are fully fed as Jersey’s don’t require as much feed per kg of liveweight to produce the same amount of milk solids. Jersey’s offer a lighter animal with a lighter environmental footprint and greater feed conversion efficiency.  That’s the Jersey Advantage!

All the best for the calving season,
The Jersey Advantage team

Fieldays Debrief

Our Fieldays collaboration with JerseyNZ and Link Livestock was a success and we enjoyed talking to many farmers about the benefits of the Jersey breed and Jersey genetics.  We hope to be able to return to Fieldays in 2024!  Jersey Advantage banners served as a great background for posts to our growing social media audience.  It was a tremendous team effort to put the site together and special acknowledgement goes to Louise Berry for managing logistics and administration, Allie King for her design and social media expertise along with Pam Goodin and Jackie Kennedy (JNZ) and Lisa Treleaven (Link Livestock) for their combined efforts. Sincere thanks also to the Jersey Advantage Board and team - Glenys Ellison, Evan Smeath, Louise Berry and James Courtman who volunteered their time to be onsite talking with farmers. 

A Better BW for Farmers – NZAEL Submission

We lodged our submission with NZAEL on Friday 23rd June and received good feedback from supporters that the submission was well written and accurately represented the views of breeders and farmers.  Thanks for Phil Brewster and Roger Ellison who developed the submission.

Special thanks to Andrew Fear and the NZAEL team for their time to talk about the Better BW proposal on site at Fieldays, was good to have the opportunity to listen and ask questions to inform our submissions.

Jersey News

Pouarua Farms - passionate about Jersey!
Pouarua Farms is 2,200ha platform made up of eight dairy farms, one drystock unit, an arable block, and a newly established blueberry block. It’s the largest dairy operation in the Hauraki region with 4,700 cows milked across 1,775 ha and producing approximately 1.65M kgMS.  The farms jointly owned by Ngāti Maru, Ngāti Paoa, Ngāti Tamaterā, Ngāti Tara Tokanui and Te Patukirikiri with the land being purchased by the five iwi in 2013. The farms were initially in a 50/50 sharemilking agreement with Landcorp from 2013 – 2019 and are now fully owned and operated by the iwi.  Jenna Smith is the CEO and she sat down with Jersey Advantage to talk about her love of Jersey cows and why Pouarua is driving an aggressive strategy to shift herd genetics toward a J12+ Jersey dominant animal.

‘The land we farm on the Plains is both drought prone and susceptible to extreme wet periods and Jersey genetics offers a lighter animal with a lighter environmental footprint, a greater feed conversion efficiency, more profitable, better fertility, and better animal health overall. The Jersey cow is the best choice of animal for our land and our iwi’s farming values’ says Smith.

Pouarua Farms inherited a F/FX herd and has used Jersey semen over all herds from the beginning.  ‘We are about profitability not productivity so Jersey animals are a no-brainer for us and if I could swap our FX herds for Jersey tomorrow and farm all 4700 animals as J12 plus, I would.’ Click here to see the full article