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COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • JANUARY 2019


Holstein spring show grows, moves to Chilliwack Producers discuss options for classifying animals, herd improvement


by DAVID SCHMIDT


VANCOUVER – A prize pool of over $130,000 meant the 2018 BC Holstein Spring Show was the biggest spring show in Canada last year, attracting almost 200 animals from BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Washington and California. “It was great to see so many people attend the show,” BC Holstein branch president Brian Hamming told members at their annual meeting in Vancouver, November 28. Show committee chair Carl Barclay


expects the 2019 show, scheduled for March 22, to be even bigger, as the prize pool will exceed $200,000. The show is also being moved to Chilliwack’s Heritage Park from its traditional location in Abbotsford, with Barclay noting the barns in Chilliwack provide room for more animals. “We’ll try it this year and see how it


goes,” he said. While the shows generally produce BC’s cow of


the year, that was not the case in 2018. Instead of a nomination and a vote, Saskatchewan Holstein’s point system was used to determine the winner. The formula emphasizes both a cow’s classification and its lifetime production and produced a tie between Willswikk Dundee Madeline, owned by Willswikk Holsteins of Cobble Hill, and Valedoorn Colle Throne, owned by Valedoorn Farms of Agassiz. “Most of our really good cows never see a show ring and may not be well-known outside their own farm,” Hamming explained. Holstein Canada chief executive officer Ann


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First and Still Foremost.


West’s in vitro fertilization program. “In future, we expect IVF will not only be used by pedigreed herds but by progressive commercial herds,” Meyer said. Carson said Holstein Canada has also commissioned an economic impact study to show the benefits of registering and classifying animals. She said the goal is to prove how using Holstein Canada’s services will make individual farmers more profitable. Richard Cantin, manager of


FILE PHOTO


Louise Carson noted BC purebred Holstein registrations were up by 4% in the past year, slightly less than the national average increase of 5%. Although Holstein Canada’s genomic testing was also up 5% last year, it was down 14% in BC in the past year.


She blamed the local decrease on Elevate, the genomic testing protocol Westgen recently introduced. Westgen sales and marketing manager Paul Meyer said farmers are using Elevate to determine their breeding strategies. They are also using more genomic bulls, meaning “very few proven bulls stay on the proof sheets very long.” Farmers are also steering away from the use of sexed semen and making more use of Boviteq


marketing and product development for CanWest DHI, also spoke to BC Holstein members, probably for the last time as a CanWest employee. He told them CanWest expects to complete its merger with the Canadian Dairy Network and Valacta (CanWest’s eastern Canadian equivalent) in early 2019, assuring them the lab in Chilliwack would continue to be one of the partnership’s four labs across Canada.


Cantin said the new company will deliver Dairy


Trace and a new Hoof Health Report, although he admitted the hoof report may not be as helpful as it could be since “very few hoof trimmers are participating.” It is also developing new testing protocols for


robot barns, something BC clearly needs. Cantin noted there are 47 BC farms with robots on DHI. This represents 17.6% of BC DHI customers, much higher than the 12.7% average across all of CanWest. Cantin also announced the three herds with the top DHI management scores in BC in the past year were Milky Way Dairy and West River Farm of Chilliwack and Kish Farms of Abbotsford.


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