News

The cooperative organisations Royal Agrifirm Group and CRV will start up a joint project designed to measure the methane emission of individual cows in actual practice. The purpose is to gain greater insight into the differences between animals and rations. This knowledge will be used to develop new products that enable livestock farmers to control methane emissions. The researchers will focus on various aspects, such as feed advice, methane efficiency breeding values and improved methods for estimating methane emissions at the cow and farm level.

CRV has already been an active player with its own branch in the United States for 12 years. And while CRV might be just a minor player in the major league of the world's largest breeding population, it is currently showing stronger growth than fellow AI organisations. The message of health and efficiency is apparently also gaining ground with American farmers.

If you decide to completely revolutionise your herd management system, then also you need cows that perform best in the new system. This was the main reason for Jelle Hakvoort, who owns a dairy farm in Rutten, to start replacing his HF herd with crossbred cows. He is now well on the way towards a 100% Jersey herd. This makes the Hakvoort-Haarman farm partnership one of the first farms to milk a Jersey herd with a New Zealand pedigree.

At the age of almost 16, Win 395 daughter Big Clara - owned by Jos, Ingrid and Ben Knoef from Geesteren - passed away after achieving total lifetime production of 200,139 kg milk with 3.78% fat and 3.53% protein. This translates to 14,627 kg fat and protein.

Twelve years ago, CRV decided to introduce the polledness trait into the Holstein breeding programme. This involved investing immediately on bulls that could compete with horned bulls in terms of breeding values. This has resulted in a strong, wide range of bulls with P and PP behind their names.

A higher feed efficiency is directly linked to better roughage utilisation. This is the concision of researchers from the Animal Breeding and Genomics group at Wageningen Livestock Research based on analysis of a data set containing the feed intake, weight and milk production data of more than 3000 cows.