Cattle genetics company, Mastergen, is leading the way for the breeding industry with the launch of the first tailor-made, downloadable bull brochures for every one of its customers.
The initiative comes at a time when farmers are confronted with more information than ever before, yet have less time available, making the business of sire selection increasingly difficult.
The service allows farmers to preselect groups of bulls, and then use a tick-box system to indicate those whose details they’d like in their brochure.
Preselection can be on a wide variety of traits, such as PLI, sexed semen, A2A2, BB kappa casein, bulls under £10, reds and red factor bulls, young genomic sires, spring calving grazing sires, or any one of the wide range of options available on the Mastergen website.
The farmer’s choices are then wrapped up in a personalised brochure, which can either be emailed to his computer or downloaded there and then, and also saved for later use.
“We are absolutely delighted to have developed this service which provides wins all round,” says Alison Dunphy, managing director of Mastergen. “The farmer not only has exactly the bulls he wants, but he can see them in an easy-to-view, brochure format showing every detail of each bull. This includes full type and production proofs as well as pedigree information – some with breeders’ or customer notes and sire analyst comments.
“In the past, he would have had a hefty, paper printed brochure, often of 100 or more pages, and many of the bulls featured would have been of no interest for his herd,” she says.
“There is substantial cost involved with printing these brochures which are published by most breeding companies three times a year, and the person picking up the cost will always be the farmer,” she says.
“The new system developed by Mastergen has virtually no cost involved, which is in keeping with our policy of operating a lean and straightforward service and passing the savings we make back to the farmer through our very competitive pricing.”
The launch of the online personalised brochures – which are available for both dairy and beef bulls – comes one year after the company first offered a postal version of the service, which was met with resounding approval.
“We had a huge thumbs-up last year for the postal version, particularly from farmers who are tired of the overwhelming weight of largely irrelevant material being received on the farm and are short of the time required to sift through the information,” she says. “We’re confident this logical next step will appeal even more amongst farmers of every generation whose time is at a premium.”
The brochures will be available to any Mastergen website user from 1 August, 2016 through mastergen.com. There will be an online video for instructions on the home page or telephone assistance is available through the sales team on 01823 430317. The website and brochure service will be updated with new genetic indexes on 9 August, 2016.