Sam Simpson’s herd has moved ahead in leaps and bounds over the past five years.

Sam, who runs the 430-cow ‘Craiglands Holsteins’ herd with her husband Mark Billing at Larpent in south-west Victoria, can’t pinpoint one thing for the burgeoning success but knows data and new technologies are playing a part

The Craiglands herd has made tremendous gains for genetic progress from about 2019. In April 2019 the herd ranked 184th in Australia for BPI and 179th for HWI. Fast forward to the recent August 2024 release and the herd in now 33rd for BPI and 39th for HWI and 36th or SI [Sustainability Index was not calculated in 2019].

The herd has been genomically testing since 2016 when they took part in the ‘Improving Herds’ project and continues to be a GINFO farm.  The business uses a lot of data from a number of sources to improve the genetic merit of the herd to constantly improve its standing within the Australian Holstein herd. 

“Over the past four years, we have incorporated Genescreen as one of those sources of information,” Sam said.  “Initially used as predominately an inbreeding report, we now also find it immensely useful when narrowing our sire selection for a bull team in a given year. 

“We use BPI, as well as other genetic parameters and herd health data to do a ‘first pass’ of potential sires, before refining this selection based on the information that we acquire from Genescreen.  This allows us to focus in on the bulls that are going to really suit our breeding objectives and fit within our budget.  No more buying more doses of semen than what we need and potentially having unwanted semen sitting on our inventory for years,” she said. 

Sam feels that the genetic space is changing rapidly and that the Genescreen report is beneficial to have a useable and clear data at her disposal to work into her business breeding objectives.

“The graphs provided allow for easy and clear understanding of how a breeding objective has had an impact on the business over 10 years”.

With the herd’s meteoric rise up the rankings, Sam says there’s not one thing she can pinpoint as having made the gains but has no doubt that genomic testing the herd and the use of sexed semen and taking a greater involvement in bull section have been key factors.

“We are now getting more dairy replacements from our higher genetic merit females and using increased amounts of sexed semen. We are also increasing the use of beef semen and now over 20% of our income is coming from beef”.

“Gaining in genetic merit has allowed us to milk less cows resulting in several advantages to cow health, labour and we are moving toward a 70:30 split of beef to dairy.

“So long as the information is true, farms have so much information available to them today to incorporate future breeding decisions.”

A Genescreen report is available from Genetics Australia. Contact your usual Genetics Australia or TLG representative to discuss how a Genescreen analysis can work for you.