It often takes entrepreneurial spirit to shake up an industry, challenge the status quo, and offer customers something of demonstrably better value than the established norm.

This is certainly the case currently within the UK’s traditional ‘black and white’ cattle breeding industry, where a fleet-footed and flexible newcomer in south Wales is changing the landscape for dairy farmers.

Based in a quite suburb of Cardiff, Bullsemen.com has in three short years sparked a revolution that is making top quality genetics more affordable and is accelerating the uptake of innovations from sexed semen to genomic proofs.

“Our overriding aim is to provide great bulls at fair prices,” says Bullsemen.com’s managing director Nick Kirby, “but we are also intent on making the latest technology available to UK farmers at the earliest opportunity.

”We are a small company with outstanding global connections, and this is a mix that is allowing us to be competitive in our pricing and first to the market with new ideas.”

Bullsemen.com’s ‘global connections’ combined with its unerring commitment to quality have already lead to the company being a dominant force in both Holstein and Friesian bull proof listings. In the all-important Profitable Lifetime Index (£PLI) published by Holstein UK, Bullsemen.com markets one-third of the top 100 sires, more than double any other single semen supplier to the UK market, and has two of the top ten on Type Merit. Bullsemen.com is also a catalyst in the re-emergence of the Friesian, offering the leading bull for the breed for both £PLI and Type Merit.

Key to the company’s success in procuring quality genetics from the United States and across Europe is, according to Nick Kirby, a ‘no holes’ approach to bull selection.

“We believe our dairy farmer customers should apply minimum standards to all the key selection criteria when choosing bulls for their herds and this is the approach that we adopt ourselves in sourcing the best genetics,” he explains.

“We define our minimum standards as £130 PLI, +200kg for milk production and +1 Type Merit, with no negative figures for feet and legs. We are the only semen supplier to offer this minimum standards approach and, whatever else is required, would always recommend this approach as the surest way to breed cows for the future.”

Innovations

There’s no doubt that sexed semen is an innovation that potentially offers dairy farmers the chance to accelerate breeding progress in their herds, but uptake in the UK has been limited to date due firstly to a lack of confidence in the technology and secondly because of the price.

Working with its US partner CRI, Bullsemen.com is not only offering a widely proven sexed semen product but is now the first company to tackle the affordability issue by launching a 75% heifer product.

Sexed semen is generally processed to offer 90% heifers, and Bullsemen.com offers a number of elite bulls on this basis through its GenChoice 90 product. However, for many farmers, a lower heifer return may well be acceptable for their breeding programme, so the company now offers the option of GenChoice 75, which is processed to produce an average 75% heifer return. The process is less aggressive, and so more semen survives the process, and that means higher quality genetics can be supplied as sexed semen at more affordable prices.

Bullsemen.com is also at the vanguard of beef from the dairy herd, working with Blade Farming to promote the viability of Holstein bull calves, and will be amongst the first to market bulls with genomic (as opposed to progeny) proofs as this technology emerges.

In contrast with convention, once again, Bullsemen.com conducts its sales through telesales and online, and has no fieldsmen or agents visiting farms. As the company’s sales and marketing manager Aimee James explains, the advantages of this approach extend beyond the obvious cost efficiencies.

“There are benefits in terms of better use of dairy farmers’ time and biosecurity,” says Aimee, “but importantly it also means a wider choice of bulls is sold on the basis of their figures.”

Success means an expansion of the Cardiff-based team, and hence Bullsemen.com is now looking to fill several positions in its telesales department. With good training provided, the opportunity to join this enterprising and entrepreneurial venture is surely one not to be missed.