Farmers flying the flag for Ayrshires
Taranaki Ayrshire breeders, Kylee and Danny Perrett are doing their best to ensure that in their farming enterprise, success follows succession.
After five seasons 50-50 sharemilking at the Ngaerebased Sentinal Stud founded by Kylee’s parents, Ivan and Robyn Fredrickson, the young couple bought the family property on September 1 last year. Previously, in 2014, they had bought the all-pedigree 250-cow herd comprising 210 Ayrshires and 40 Holstein-Friesians.
While Danny’s experience in farming Ayrshires was limited before teaming up with Kylee, he had worked with the breed previously within cross-bred herds.
During his 22-year farming career, Danny has managed large herds in New Zealand and also enjoyed a stint managing a smaller herd in Ireland.
Kylee’s passion for the Ayrshire breed is easily explained: it comes from her parents, especially from her father, who she says has an excellent eye for dairy cattle. Those genes have clearly been passed on.
In 2016 Kylee was awarded Ayrshire New Zealand’s prestigious Kiteroa Trophy for her contribution to the breed.
That recognition followed her success as a junior show-ring judge. Kylee on four occasions won the Arran Trophy at the New Zealand Ayrshire Association youth judging competition at the New Zealand Dairy Event (NZDE) in Feilding. She is the only person to have won it more than once and also won the NZDE All Breeds Young Judge Competition twice, beating all place-getters in the Ayrshire, Jersey and Holstein-Friesian contests.
Sentinal Stud is 95 (effective) hectares, is flat, well drained, and long.
‘‘It’s two kilometres to the back of the farm, which means the cows have to do a lot of walking. This could be up to 8km in one day,’’ says Kylee.
‘‘Production is just over
103,000kg milksolids. We are, however, on track to produce
6000kg above this for this season, which will be a record production for the farm.
‘‘We had a pretty good spring but since then it’s been up and down in terms of pasture production. We made only an average volume of supplementary feed. Currently, we are feeding our cows 90 per cent of their diet in supplement each day.’’
Reflecting on her parents’ successes within the show-ring, Kylee says that among the greatest of these would have come with Sentinal Swany’s Pet in the early 1990s.
‘‘Then followed Sentinal Zoe’s
Love. She took out the title of champion cow at the World Conference in 2004. The most recent top performer was Sentinal Zoe’s
Lara, which was judged the reserve North Island champion cow. She was a really good breeding cow.
‘‘There are still descendants of those cows in our current herd.’’
The third largest society of the traditional dairy breeds behind Holstein-Friesians and Jerseys, Ayrshires will never overhaul the top two breeds and will always be held back by the lack of numbers, Kylee concedes.
‘‘We just don’t have the numbers of members or the numbers of farmers in New Zealand using Ayrshire bulls, and this holds us back in terms of proving bulls.
‘‘However, there was a big day held in Christchurch last month which promoted using Ayrshires as cross breeders. The promotion suggested that if farmers were looking for a cross, then why not use a natural breed which has longevity; great health traits, foraging ability as well as being stronger and more durable than a Jersey, which could still throw a black and white calf.
‘‘Ayrshires are foragers. I was talking to a lady the other
day who has only three or four Ayrshires in with her herd of Holstein-Friesians and Jerseys and she commented that it was always the Ayrshires which were under the fences, in the creek getting food where they could. They are a pretty hardy breed and that’s what we like about them.’’
Kylee and Danny Perrett are unfazed by the fact that on today’s markets it is fat rather than protein products which are fetching the premiums.
‘‘We don’t worry about it at all. We just farm how we want to farm and we just roll with it because it’s always going to change. If we started to chase fat production now, by the time we built up the genetics in the herd, it would probably change back to an incentive to breed for protein.’’
Commenting on traits that breeders are seeking to add or to eliminate from the Ayrshire breed, Kylee says that across the breeds, efforts are being made to increase fertility.
‘‘We are not necessarily chasing A2A2. However, we are eliminating the use of A1A1 bulls from our team.
‘‘We’d love to eliminate lowfertility families. We’d also like to eliminate facial eczema genetically. We believe it will be the way of the future to eliminate facial eczema through biogenetics, but it’s not something which we can breed for yet.’’