The United States is a leading centre of Holstein breeding. CRV operates its own breeding programme there, which has resulted in a broad, internationally competitive offering of top-ranked TPI bulls. CRV's bulls are unique thanks to the exclusive breeding values for feed efficiency, CRV Health and CRV Efficiency.
They are almost all older than ten years, have each produced more than 100,000 kg of milk – and some of them even 10,000 kg of fat and protein – and together account for a staggering 1.8 million kg of milk! This exceptional performance inspired CRV to make a video of these sixteen absolute champions in milk production owned by dairy farmers Jos, Ingrid and Ben Knoef in Geesteren. Eleven of these animals have a CRV pedigree or originate from CRV's breeding programme.
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.
‘They're basically just really good, ideal dairy cows, who look after themselves, have no problems and produce plenty of milk.’ This is how dairy farmer Jan Priems describes his Peeldijker Liesjes. Accounting for some 80% of the herd, this cow family is certainly the most important name at the dairy farm in De Mortel, where 130 cows tally up a rolling annual average of 11,850 kg of milk with 4.45% fat and 3.54% protein.
The Semen Processing Center and the International Logistics Center in Deventer, the Netherlands play a crucial role in the production process of CRV. Every year, 4 million straws are filled, inspected, registered, frozen and dispatched to dairy and beef farmers worldwide. After processing all straws are stored here for a quarantine period of at least 30 days.