Gippsland farmer Daryl Hoey has had numerous bulls into the AI system, but his latest addition is something special.
GT, which is joining the Genetics Australia Jersey portfolio this spring, has been named in honour of Daryl’s great mate, Greg Tiller.
While it’s a bittersweet moment, it also gives Daryl great pride to recognise the contribution Greg made to his Beulah Jerseys herd and to the cattle breeding industry in general.
Greg died suddenly on August 20, 2023 after a 20-year career as a Genetics Australia field sales representative based at Rochester in Northern Victoria.
Daryl now farms at Wonthaggi but met Greg not long after he bought his previous farm at Katunga in 2002.
“Greg started at GA a few months after we bought the farm and he became one of my best friends,” Daryl said. “We spent plenty of hours on the phone or at the kitchen table discussing genetics.
“My enjoyment out of breeding cows and breeding bulls has never been the same since the loss of Greg. I’ve lost someone that I spent so much time discussing and debating genetics with. His death left a massive hole in my life – I just don’t have those same conversations with anyone else.”
The connections Greg made with farmers went well beyond genetics. “Apart from just calling on farms to make sales, Greg would talk about farming and life and making sure people were okay. Greg was always there if you needed those conversations. He was always conscious of other people’s circumstances and always checked in on people and made sure everyone was okay.”
Despite Daryl’s loss, GT the bull is set to do GT the man proud.
While Daryl has had plenty of bulls in AI, GT is special not only for the emotional connection but for his outstanding potential.
“I don’t necessarily strive to put a bull into AI. With over 80% of semen used being sexed, breeding bulls is not a focus. I just strive to breed better genetics in my herd and then sometimes the genetics come together to produce something special”, Daryl said.
“If you have consistent cow families and high-indexing animals then the chances of that happening is greater. The high genomic animals keep coming to the top if you keep breeding your better lines to good bulls.”
GT comes from a long line of cows stemming back to south-west Victorian farmers Rosemary and Pat Roache’s Fairy cow family which produced the bull Outinfront that Genetics Australia bought more than 20 years ago. This led to the Fairy family in Daryl’s Beulah Jerseys, one of his strongest cow families.
GT’s mother Dougg T Fairy was the number one genomics heifer in Australia, and is still ranked ninth, and his grandmother Triple N Fairy was one of the top genomic animals in her year group.
“The cow family for four or five generations has always been high on genomics for the year level and GT seems to have picked up a lot of his sire’s attributes,” Daryl said.
“He’s got strong mammary and fertility, which are some of the key areas that I’m focussing on at the moment. Fertility is something the breed seems to have forgotten about. He’s a really solid bull, not necessarily outstanding in one particular area but solid across the board.”
Dougg T Fairy was sent to Genetics Australia’s TLG centre at Camperdown to be flushed and when they got two heifers and two bulls, Daryl was determined to make sure a bull was named in recognition of Greg.
“This has special meaning,” he said.
GT’s two embryo transfer Starlord sisters are still the number one and two females born in 2024 and will be soon flushed at TLG.
Daryl now milks about 300 cows, 95 per cent Jersey, on 177 hectares near Wonthaggi.
He hopes that by adding GT to the Genetics Australia spring 2025 release he will be able to honour his friend and breeding buddy. “We didn’t always agree but he never told you that you were wrong,” Daryl said. “Greg always let you decide yourself but he challenged you and threw different options on the table. He always kept the communication lines open.”
