Rissington’s challenge: Existing breed association metrics didn’t reflect real-world performance or resonate with commercial producers, making it difficult to make confident breeding decisions or communicate genetic value to clients.
How Vytelle helped: Vytelle SENSE™ provided precise individual feed intake measurements that revealed significant variation between animals, enabling data-driven breeding and culling decisions.
About Rissington
Rissington is New Zealand’s oldest performance herd of Simmental cattle, established in 1971 on a 1,100-hectare station that has been in the family since the 1800s. Built by grading up from a commercial Angus and Hereford cow base, the operation has remained focused on commercially-driven traits from the outset. Today, Rissington runs around 1,000 breeding cows – all recorded and genotyped – selling over 400 bulls annually into New Zealand’s beef and dairy industries, and exporting live animals, semen, and embryos across the globe for five decades.
The challenge: Turning assumptions into objective measurements
Despite their strong reputation, Rissington was finding it difficult to make fully informed breeding decisions with incomplete data. “We’d already been selecting US cattle that had been feed-efficiency tested,” explained Daniel Absolom, “but without measuring individual feed intake on our own property, we couldn’t fully understand the variation within our herd or make optimal breeding decisions.”
The solution: Vytelle SENSE
After years of consideration and exposure to the technology through annual US visits, Rissington invested in Vytelle SENSE in 2017. “We’d looked at Vytelle (or GrowSafe as it was) years before, but it’s a big capital outlay,” said Daniel. “But, once you’ve got it, that initial barrier becomes a competitive advantage.”
Once implemented, Vytelle SENSE’s feed intake nodes provided precise measurements of individual animal consumption. “Once we began measuring individual intakes on our property, it revealed huge variation,” Daniel explained. The data showed top-performing bulls achieving approximately 4kg of dry matter per kg of gain, while lower performers required 12kg – a three-fold difference that had previously been invisible.”
This revelation enabled confident breeding and culling decisions based on objective data rather than assumptions. While Daniel acknowledges that he’s playing “the long game” – as traits like feed efficiency can take five to ten years to shift significantly – his scale of testing over 2,000 bulls has enabled relatively fast gains.
Market advantage through data-driven communication
Perhaps most significantly, the feed efficiency data has transformed Rissington’s marketing approach and customer relationships. “90% of our bulls are contracted into the beef industry two years ahead, and six months ahead for dairy,” Daniel reported.
The key breakthrough has been the ability to communicate with commercial producers in their own language. “Feed efficiency speaks the language of commercial producers – kilograms of dry matter. That makes it more powerful than EBVs alone,” he explained.
By integrating feed efficiency data into their genetic selection decisions, Rissington has set itself apart in the industry. The result is a breeding program that remains “grounded in science and objective data, but also produces cattle that people really like the look of” – combining the best of both worlds for sustained commercial success.
