United Kingdom-Dairy cattle from Cornwall bound for Brazil.

SEMEN from Quintrell Maximus Cobalt EX 93, a Jersey young bull bred and owned by Michael Colwell of Redruth, has been sold to Brazil.

Cobalt is a son of Quintrell Ultra Marine EX95, twice dairy inter-breed champion at the Royal Cornwall Show.

The Colwell family farms 240 pedigree Jersey cows on a high-forage, spring-calving system. Within this regime, Ultra Marine has yielded over 6,950kg of milk in every lactation except her first. She has an average calving interval of 373 days across her five lactations.

Cobalt’s semen goes to Rio Grande do Sul, the most southerly state of Brazil.

One of the farms which will use the semen is Butia, owned by Veronica Bertagnolli. Butia has 170 cows within a 2,000 hectare business. It is at 2,400 feet above sea level and has an annual rainfall averaging 50 inches.

The cows graze all year round, permanent pasture in summer and oats in winter. Bunker feeding of maize silage plus soya is offered for one hour after each milking as the only supplement to grazing. Despite being out day and night, yield per cow is 5,900kg.

The aim is to increase to 240 cows by 2010, when the family will have been on the farm for 50 years, and progress to 300 cows after that.

Roger Trewhella of UK Jerseys visited the farm last August as part of a UK Trade and Industry-assisted Market Visit Research scheme.

He said: "This high plains area offers the most amazing dairying potential I have ever seen around the world. The region is intent on taking over from New Zealand as the world hub of dairy exports and, from everything I saw, they could achieve it.

"We are delighted by this sale and really appreciate the efforts of British Livestock Genetics in negotiating the export standards as well as UK Sire Services, which operates from Dartington in Devon, for managing the export process."