ROYAL GOLDEN GUERNSEY SEMEN IMPORT!!
BREAKING NEWS!
FIRST NEW GENETICS IN 18 YEARS
Yorkshire Moors
The RGG semen import project is in its last stages! The 3 bucks have finished their collections in the export center, and if they clear the final month of quarantine in Yorkshire, the tank will be imported sometime this summer. There is always room for a mishap until it actually reaches its final destination, but after a year and a half of hard work I finally feel comfortable making the announcement.
Immense thanks to Paul Wells with the Motts herd in Yorkshire for his intrepid willingness to take this on with me, and his great patience with all the bumps in a road travelled for the first time. Thanks also to our enthusiastic vet Hannah Cammassa with LLM Farmvets, and to Ian McDougall at Farmgene who helped push through updating export requirements at a potentially fatal moment.
REQUIREMENTS TO PURCHASE LISTED BELOW
The straws will be consigned with Biogenics, and will be at minimum $100 each – my expenses are in the region of $15,000 plus the countless hours and high risk of the endeavour. I wont have an exact price until the import is finished.
There is a chance of repeating the project next year - now that I have the hang of it and have a team of folks in England who are, incredibly, willing to struggle through it again! However, there is a high possibility of the US closing the import window at any time due to diseases creeping northwards in Europe.
A final thing to be aware of: While the new genetic material will be invaluable for the breed in the US, there are compromises – the English RGG’s have a lot of faults that continuously show up due to the closed genetics, despitethe fact that these bucks are from some of the finest lines and the result of decades of careful breeding. There will likely be occasional poor quality udders and pasterns in the offspring, so breeders must be aware that there will be some culls in the first generation.
REQUIREMENTS FOR PURCHASERS (To maximize benefit to the breed)
Dual register their herd.
Many owners have beef with either BGS or the ADGA, but the reality is the breed is caught between a heritage rooted in England and supported only by the English registry and a future where the many resources and familiarity provided by ADGA will become useful. If we are fortunate enough to get more imports of semen or embryos in the future, or export from the US to the UK, keeping history of lineages back to the beginning on Grassroots will be helpful. The US and the UK are the only countries working to better Guernsey Goats and cooperation would be immensely valuable. If there is a split between registries and some animals get left out of either one, the picture of the breed as a whole becomes incomplete. Perhaps someday we will be beyond this limbo, but not quite yet.
Have clean herd PCR testing for Johnes and serum testing for CAE and CL.
Johnes disease killed the Golden Guernseys in the US and devastated some of our best British Guernseys. Wasting this semen on infected herds would be very unfortunate. Questions and test results can be sent directly to me.
Be members of the GGBoA.
This is an important way to support the breed and the small group of people working hard to promote it– it’s the official organization representing Guernsey Goats to the ADGA, and we need more members in order to represent democratically. A few others and I are working on dramatically increasing the benefits of membership and expanding the projects of the organization, but in order to provide more resources we MUST HAVE MORE MEMBERS– website costs go up dramatically with increased functionality. Details will be in a separate post and on the website. It’s a pretty inexpensive way to make a difference!