Bundalong Holsteins produces top animals to suit Australian dairy farms

His passion has been rewarded with his family's stud operation Bundalong Holsteins supplying about 10 bulls to progeny test programs around Australia each year and the production of some of Australia's top dairy bulls, including recent graduate Medallion.

Brian, along with his wife, Janelle, and parents Bill and Betty, operates a successful commercial dairy farm at Kongwak in Gippsland, Vic, as well as a stud operation.

His breeding philosophy is pretty simple - to produce cows with good production but that also have good functional type traits to make them profitable.

The family's operation has its feet set firmly in commercial dairy farming. The farm and stud operation are run as separate businesses, and although profits from the stud are sometimes put back into the farm, the farm never supports the stud.

All stud costs - including animal registrations, semen costs (because cheaper choices would be made if there was no stud business) and specialist services such as embryo transfers - are borne by the stud business, which must be profitable in its own right.

The farm runs 230 cows on an effective milking area of 92 hectares. Young stock, dry cows and bulls are also run on the farm, which has a total area of 170ha which includes 40ha leased.

Brian is a member of a farm discussion group run by Gippsland consultant John Mulvany, which is focused on profitable farming, tracking profit per hectare.

The farm operates a simple system. The herd is milked year round with calving from March until the end of September. It supplies Murray Goulburn under its domestic incentive scheme, which pays a bonus if more than 40 per cent of milk is produced between February and August.

Between 1.5 and 1.8 tonnes of grain per cow per year is feed in the bail, depending on the profitability at any given time. Herd numbers fluctuate around the 230 throughout the year, with a flexible approach taken to cow culling depending on the season and the milk price. "In a bad year, we might sell cull cows in April, but in a good year we might hold onto a cow we know we want to cull for a few more months and get that extra production out of her," Brian said.

The other flexibility is conserving any surplus feed as hay or silage to feed back at other times of the year.

The stocking rate at 2.2 cows/milking hectare was the most sustainable for the farm business. "That rate means we are not exposed to high feed costs in the bad times but also able to capitalise on the times when ration prices are more favourable," Brian said.

The extended calving period also made the system easier for the family to manage as little outside labour - only the occasional relief milker - is employed on the farm. It also meant that infrastructure, such as the calving shed and automatic calf feeders, was used for a longer time, Brian said.

Brian's idea of a profitable cow is one that's not too big, lasts a long time in the herd and has good production. "Cows that produce, reproduce and have good functional type," he said.

The oldest cows in the Bundalong herd are 12 years old with many others on their fifth and sixth lactations. But the Andersons also aim to have the younger animals "pushing the older ones out of the herd" because the younger animals represented the best genetics.

The stud has been operating successfully for a number of years. The keys to success are identifying elite cow families, finding specific animals from those families that have the right sire stack and classification and then developing them in the herd.

Bundalong Holstein's cow families include Glomar Lucky, which produced Medallion; Waves, which produced leading Holstein bull Orana; Carly, which produced top bull Cardinal; Dee; Genevieve, Coconut and Perfector, which produced the current Australian cow of the year (Bundalong Donor Perfector EX91 4E, a 10-Star brood cow).

The stud also aims to meet the market and sells bulls and heifers in the way that commercial dairyfarmers wanted.

Brian said the key to being a successful stud was to pick the right genetics that were going to be needed in future dairy herds. With it taking 11 years from a mating decision to having a proven bull with daughters in farmers' herds, it was vital to look ahead, he said.

Looking to the future now, Brian said there were two key areas on which to focus. The first was protein because a farm's protein produced 75 per cent of its income, so it was likely to become a more important component in the Australian Profit Ranking, he said.

The second was health traits and survivability. As farms grew and used more labour, they would be looking for "easy-care cows" - ones that did not have problems with mastitis or getting in calf or lameness.

Brian is also an enthusiast for the new genomic technology and has already genomically tested about 15 heifers in the herd. Bundalong has been using genomic bulls in its breeding program for the past 3-4 years.

Brian said genomics would allow him to identify other cow families that might be worthwhile including in his herd.

It would also help with decisions about which heifers in the herd to flush and about choosing the best animals to buy into the herd. Two full sisters would have the same parent average but genomics would show which had the most potential.

Genomics has also opened up opportunities for selling bulls. Bundalong had three young bulls of 12 in Australia's first genomic-proven team launched by Genetics Australia in 2009.

Medallion was one of those bulls and graduated as a daughter-proven bull in April.

According to Genetics Australia, the bull has become the highest demand Holstein in Australia. In April it was 16th highest for APR, but in addition to its high profit ranking it was also the number one Australian-proven bull for overall type and mammary system.

This story first appeared on Australian Dairyfarmer