GUM Hill Poll South Devon stud, Mount Bryan, has become the first in the breed to export a large quantity of semen from Australia to the United States and New Zealand.
Glan and Daphne Lines and their family have just exported many hundreds of straws of semen in Gum Hill Medium Red 530 to Darlynn Cattle Company, Minnesota, US, and Fraser McKenzie, Wanuka South Devons, NZ.
Mrs Lines will be among 24 Australians on the World South Devon Conference tour to the US in September, visiting herds in 14 states.
Gum Hill has been breeding South Devons for 42 years and the Lines are thrilled that the sale will result in their decades of breeding now influencing herds overseas.
The deal has been six years in the making, with Mrs Lines meeting Darlynn Cattle Company's Dar Giess at previous South Devon world conferences and discussing their breeding program.
In 2011, he came to Australia and inspected the Gum Hill herd, as the then world president of the South Devon Society.
Gum Hill herd was included in an extensive tour of Australian herds.
The appeal for Mr Giess was that the Lines 140-registered cow stud had been a closed herd for 30 years, rotating bulls between their three herds, offering out-cross bloodlines different from the sires which had been used extensively in the US.
He was also impressed by the herds need to thrive under harsh rangeland conditions and the Lines' selection pressure on breeding structurally sound Poll cattle with calving ease allowing nature to be the selector.
"We are a stud but the stud cattle are run like our commercials," Mr Lines said. "They either calve by themselves or they don't calve."
A major criteria for them before the sale was progeny testing the AI bull Medium Red 530 for two years to give them confidence it would perform. And the sire has ticked a lot of boxes.
"They didn't want the biggest bull but a medium-frame bull so they had the ability to calve well, and because of their climatic conditions where they are housed for five months of the year they didn't want extreme growth animals which are costly to feed," Mr Lines said.
"He (Medium Red) had 100 cows in total and on the production figures in our three herds - red, blue and yellow and his was the top-performing progeny as a group."
* Full report in Stock Journal, June 19, 2014 issue.
Catherine Miller
Stock Journal's livestock editor and South East correspondent.
Stock Journal's livestock editor and South East correspondent.
