Genetics pays off for Carenda

Ray and Mal Kitchen and their wives Donna and Lesley run Carenda Holstein stud as a sideline to their Kitchen Farms dairy enterprise supplying about 3.5 million litres of milk a year to Lion Dairy.

Their Carenda bulls are sought after locally and nationally at sales, Mr Kitchen said.

In March at the 55th annual WA Holstein Sale one of their bulls, Carenda Tiergan 293 ET1747340, created a new auction record price of $ 11,250 for a Holstein bull sold in WA.

In the Australian Dairy Herd Improvement Scheme (ADHIS) Good Bull Guide for Holsteins in April, under the Balanced Primary Index genomic category, six of the top 11 bulls were from Carenda.

“Six bulls in the top 11 is pretty good really,” Mr Kitchen said.

But it is Kitchen Farms’ dairy herd improvement where the interest in genetics and breeding – inherited from parents Jack and Mary who started the herd in 1960 – has really paid off.

“There are much bigger dairy enterprises that produce much more milk than we do, but in terms of production per cow we’re right up there, both domestically (in WA) and nationally,” Mr Kitchen said.

“The herd average is 10,000 litres (per cow) over a standard lactation of 305 days.” But it is not just production they chase.

“We breed for longevity, fertility and health, as well as production,” Mr Kitchen said.

“We use our own bulls listed for AI, including the proven bulls and the young genomic ones, as well as other local bulls and international bulls that we think might have the characteristics we want.”

That 55 years of herd improvement, first by father then by sons, has resulted in Kitchen Farms’ Holsteins – the milking herd can get up to 400 cows at the peak and about 350 calves are produced each year – being rated as the third best dairy herd in Australia.

“We’re pretty proud of that,” Mr Kitchen said.

“It’s not just out of 150 dairy farms here (in WA), its national and there’s plenty of competition out there.”