The weather is up at last, so hopefully most sheds around the country are empty after the last few weeks of good spring conditions. With plenty of grass on most farms and cows milking well, it’s a great time to be dairy farming and makes a big change from some of the springs we’ve seen over the last few years. Hopefully it will hold like this for the start of the breeding season.

The cows are milking very well this week, averaging just under 30 litres at 3.98% fat and 3.38% protein or 2.2kg of milk solids. We are feeding 3kg of meal to prevent grass tetany, with high growth rates, high nitrogen levels and some cold nights increasing the risk of this causing problems. The last few cows will get a bottle of calcium as standard now as well, to prevent any milk fever problems.

We have only five cows left to calve, with most showing a good springing, so hopefully there’s not too much watching left to do on that front. The focus will quickly switch to the breeding season next week, with AI starting here on 21 April.

We type classified and milk recorded the herd this week with good results, so we will continue to back our own genetics to keep delivering like this and hopefully keep improving herd performance over the next few years. With this in mind, we took a good collection of AI straws from some of our stockbulls last week, again for our own use only.

We are in the position where we can use our own genetics to make the progress that we need and not in the position that some farmers find themselves in this spring: where, in some cases, the AI companies are refusing to sell them the semen they selected for the upcoming breeding programme.

The numbers, the bulls and the intellectual property of the commercial companies are more important than the needs of the farmers and the cows on whose backs these companies were built.

Most of these companies were formed with a co-op ethos, to serve the needs of their farmer shareholders. They have moved very far away from these ideals over the last 20 years, and the last few weeks have revealed the extent of this sea change. We are now dealing with companies that care much more about making money than supplying good genetics to farmers.

A good financial return needs to be made to stay in business, but the current situation with genomic-tested bulls being treated as cash cows and given the same status as previously taken by daughter-proven bulls is very risky for the farmer.

There is very little risk to the breeding companies, however. If a hot genomic bull fails to breed well, the farmer suffers a huge financial cost, while the breeding company has already moved on to the next young superstar.

Not selling a bull because you might have to compete with his progeny in the future is taking this profiteering to a new level.

Pulling out of a young-bull testing programme for the same reason is equally damning. The reality is that it is easier and more profitable to turn young bulls quickly than to wait for verification of the projected proof.

If the genomic proofs we’ve seen for the last few years are accurate, why are 500kg of milk solids, a 365-day calving interval and an 85% six-week calving rate all top 10% performance figures, rather than the average figures for the national herd?