Profitable dairy farming demands cows calving (and producing milk) at a specific time determined by the availability of pasture, but the vagaries of animal production always means a few cows are ‘late’.

In a world first, farm improvement company, (and artificial breeding pioneer), LIC, developed a ranking system identifying bulls whose offspring were consistently born earlier than average. This enables the calving date of late cows to be brought forward the following year.

"Demand for semen from our Short Gestation bull team is growing every year and we're investing heavily in embryo transfer technology to drive genetic progress for this trait," said LIC’s General Manager Genetcs, Peter Gatley.

"But we’re also keen to incorporate a marker so farmers can instantly identify whether a calf should be kept as a replacement or not. We’re interested in crossing with Hereford to bring in the white-face gene for this purpose, but we have an even more exciting option. It's a long shot but we'll never know what's possible till we try it.

That long-shot is a limited trial, which began in the spring of 2006 in the South Island, crossing Yaks with dairy cows.

Known to interbreed naturally with cows, Yaks have a gestation period which is around 25 days shorter than dairy cows. (Average Yak gestation period is 257 compares compared to 282 for dairy cows).

"We want to measure the gestation length of the Yak/dairy cross to see if it approximates the parent average as this would give farmers an advantage of almost two weeks.

"This is the first stage of the trial and we realise it could fall over for any number of reasons – semen collection, conception rates, gestation length and the value of the resulting offspring.

"We need to tick the boxes on all of these issues, and the advantage of this trial is we’ll have results within a relatively short period of time – so we’ll know whether it’s worth continuing".

So, what will a cross between a Yak and a cow look like?

"We’re very interested to find out. And we'll want to establish their value as a beef animal".

And what do you call the Yak-Cow cross? "I’m sure we’ll get a few suggestions," Peter Gatley said.

TheCattleSite News Desk