LIC Sire Proving Scheme (SPS) Farmers of the Year Bryan and Suzanne Jackson have been in the programme for 18 years.

North Otago farmer Matt Ross has been elected to the LIC board for a four-year term.

LIC chairman Murray King says the co-op – owned by dairy farmers and sharemilkers – doesn’t prescribe what is right for individual farmers.

LIC’s herd improvement roadshow last month attracted about 1500 farmers nationwide.

Dairy farmers with herringbone sheds can now make use of a new LIC Automation YieldSense app to help them determine during milking which cows are producing the best or the worst on any given day.

Farmers can now benchmark their farm performances on a national scale, thanks to a new online tool.

Fonterra and LIC are in the final stages of developing an online tool, Agrigate, designed specifically to help farmers improve their farm performance through the use of their existing data.

A milestone 55 years in the making was passed in a split-second: with one clamp of a tag punch LIC tagged its 10,000th sire proving scheme (SPS) bull calf.

Dairy farmers are moving away from breeding bobby calves in favour of quality dairy/beef cross calves which are fetching record prices and in demand from rearers, finishers and the meat processing industry.

LIC has bowed to shareholder pressure by dropping its plan to transfer its herd testing and Minda businesses to a subsidiary.