A GENETIC PARTNERSHIP
By Bonnie Cooper

They may be two very different A.I. companies, but today the strengths of each is translating into growing success for the Elmira, Ontario, based partner-ship of ABS Global (Canada), Inc. and St. Jacobs ABC. The story of these two A.I. companies, how they came together, the bulls who have built their reputation, and what their union has meant to dairymen in Canada is one we will try to share in this issue.

The St. Jacobs Artificial Breeding Co-operative story begins here in Canada almost 50 years ago. While its name has changed four times, its acronym, St. Jacobs ABC, has always remained the same.

It was in 1958 that Earl S. Feick, an experienced inseminator and handler of bulls, founded a private A.I. enterprise at St. Jacobs, Ont., that he called St. Jacobs Artificial Breeding Company.

Fox Brothers of Guelph, Ont., supplied semen to Feick who offered a technician service to breeders in Waterloo County and parts of Perth County. Feick later purchased some bulls of his own and started using their semen.

In 1968, due to A.I. regulations, the company changed to a member owned co-operative with 50 members. The barn on Feick’s farm was converted to a modern bull housing facility, with a laboratory and office. Feick remained as the unit’s manager until the mid-1970s. Dr. John MacPherson and Peter Penner helped to collect and process semen at the unit in the early years enabling it to export semen to Mexico. At its peak, the unit housed about 40 dairy and beef bulls of which about half were owned by the unit. The balance were privately owned bulls who were there for custom collection and processing of semen. Feick was noted for his great bull care and as a result custom collection became a big part of St. Jacobs’ business attracting such bulls as Agro Acres Unique and Browndale Sir Christopher. In 1979-80, a new bull housing facility for 33 bulls, along with an office and laboratory, was built on land two miles west of Elmira. The unit, however, strug-gled financially many times and had several managers.

In 1985, Doug Brown of Browndale Farm, Paris, Ont., became a director on the St. Jacobs Board. When the unit ran into financial trouble again in 1986, Brown formed a company called Elmira ABC Limited which once established paid off the unit’s debts to keep it from going bankrupt and in turn received the co-operative’s assets and a manage-ment contract. To retain a Class A semen license, however, the unit needed to be a co-operative without share capital, so Brown leased the facility back to St. Jacobs and stayed on as its manager on a profit sharing basis. Elmira ABC also assumed the contract to market the unit’s semen internationally.

With new ideas and a fresh approach, Brown succeeded in attracting addi-tional business and cash flow for the unit. He got contracts for the unit to house, collect and market semen from the sons of Brookview Tony Charity for Hanover Hill Holsteins and Romandale Farms, and to house and collect semen for the Modern Sires program of Albert Cormier and the French A.I. company OGER. He also started a young sire profit sharing program of his own. Those bulls were housed and marketed through St. Jacobs, with Browndale Stardust being one of the stars. Brown and the staff were also instrumental in introducing the concept of “semen pooling”. St. Jacobs was the first A.I. company in this country to buy and carry semen from other Canadian A.I. units on a day-to-day basis for its mem-bers, bringing in such popular bulls as “Starbuck” from CIAQ and “Marathon” from BCAI Centre, an idea which was soon adopted by other units.

The other partner in this story is ABS Global, Inc., the DeForest, Wisconsin based A.I. company.

Established in 1941, ABS is the oldest A.I. company now represented in Canada. ABS was started in the United States by J. Rockefeller Prentice, a man who believed deeply in the principle of progeny tested sires. The first calf born in North America from frozen semen on May 19, 1953 was the result of semen frozen by ABS. In 1967, ABS became a part of W.R. Grace & Co. Bulls like Paclamar Bootmaker, Hanover-Hill Triple Threat-Red, S-W-D Valiant and many high ranking production bulls were part of their bull battery during those years. In 1994 the unit was sold to Protein Genetics Inc. In November 1999, ABS Global Inc. was purchased by Genus plc, an England based agriculture company with holdings not only in bovine A.I. but also in agricultural con-sulting and a veterinary supply distri-bution company. In 2005, Genus also acquired Sygen International plc whose trade brands include PIC (swine) and SyAqua (shrimp). Today Genus is the largest animal breeding company in the world, with stock publicly traded on the U.K. stock exchange.

ABS’s presence in Canada may feel new, but it actually dates back to the 1950s when Dr. Keith Robson of Manitoba began distributing semen for ABS in that province. In 1958, ABS of Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of ABS, was established. In the early 1960s, ABS began providing technician service in Manitoba. In 1974, it opened a bull stud in Calgary to house exotic beef breeds from Europe. The stud was shut down four years later, but the distribution centre remained open until 1991 when ABS contracted the importing, storage and distribution of its semen through St. Jacobs ABC.

ABS built its reputation in the U.S. largely on high production bulls. By the late 1980s, however, it recognized that there were further markets to be tapped if it could develop some “type” bulls. What it lacked though was a customer base used to buying those kinds of bulls from it. Here in Canada, ABS was fairly well-known in western Canada, but in eastern Canada its impact had not been as great.

In 1989, with ABS wanting to have greater access to the eastern Canada market and St. Jacobs ABC in need of additional bulls and product to sell, discussions between the two companies were initiated. In 1990 ABS agreed to help Doug Brown co-manage the co-operative, working through their wholly owned Canadian subsidiary, ABS Canada. Dave Melles, regional manager for ABS Canada, was appointed general manager and took over the daily management of the unit. In 1993, ABS Canada bought half interest in Elmira ABC and formed a legal partnership with Brown. Although there were now three fundamentally different companies working together under one umbrella, each retained their own identity and performed defined functions and responsibilities.

As the group attempted to grow its business in Ontario, however, it faced numerous restrictions because of the Ontario A.I. Act, legislation which it sought to have changed several times. The repeal of the Ontario A.I. Act in January 2000, which removed protected territo-ries for A.I. units and increased compe-tition, eventually opened the door to further expansion for ABS and St. Jacobs.

In the fall of 2000 St. Jacobs ABC purchased the remaining 50 percent of Elmira ABC from Brown, making St. Jacobs and ABS Canada equal 50-50 partners in the ownership of the unit’s production and bull housing facilities at Elmira. St. Jacobs also signed a long-term contract with ABS Canada for the marketing and management of St. Jacobs and transferred all of its semen marketing to the ABS Global network.

While seemingly complex, the ABS Global (Canada), Inc./St. Jacobs ABC partnership is actually relatively simple. St. Jacobs ABC’s primary function is to acquire, sample and develop bulls that are unique to the ABS Global product offering. ABS Canada and its parent company, ABS Global Inc., in turn provide the marketing arm for that semen and are the exclusive distributors for all St. Jacobs products. Elmira ABC, which is owned equally by St. Jacobs and ABS Canada, is the land and facili-ties owner. Elmira ABC leases the Elmira facilities to the Production Division of ABS Canada which then looks after the housing and production services for the St. Jacobs ABC and ABS owned bulls.

St. Jacobs ABC remains a farmer-owned A.I. co-operative with its own constitution and mandate. It has 210 members, the majority of whom reside in Ontario. It is governed by a five member Board of Directors. Members voted recently to change its name again to St. Jacobs Artificial Breeding Co-operative and become a taxable co-operative because it has outgrown its corporation without share capital, not-for-profit status. St. Jacobs has no paid staff per se, instead contracting any of the management, administrative and support staff they need through a management contract with ABS Canada. Tim Abbott of Fairfield, Vermont, is the current St. Jacobs ABC general manager, in addition to being a regional sire analyst for ABS Global, a role he has fulfilled for over 15 years. Abbott spends about 80 percent of his time working on St. Jacobs’ projects and the other 20 percent buying bulls for ABS Global in New England and Canada. As St. Jacobs’ general manager, he manages the orga-nization from a business standpoint, works on the advertising and marketing of their bulls, growing their programs and selecting the bulls. Peter Draper, who is manager of Market Development for ABS Canada and St. Jacobs ABC, is the other employee who splits his time between the two organizations. Draper joined the St. Jacobs staff in 1986 and now has over 20 years of experience working for St. Jacobs and/or ABS.

Darren Fehr is the general manager for ABS Canada and oversees the Sales Division. Paul Melody heads ABS’s Production Division at the Elmira facil-ity where there are 14 employees. There are five people in the ABS sales division at the Elmira office and 50 more sales representatives located across Canada, of which nine are also sales managers. ABS Global has 700 sales representatives in North America, with 60 percent of these being full-time employees.

As Peter Draper says, “We were able to put a very small Canadian company together with a very large global com-pany and not take the entity away from either one, while allowing each to focus on what it does best.”

ABS and St. Jacobs each select and buy or lease their own bulls based on their own goals and objectives, but prove them together. Bulls are selected differently so when put together they enhance the ABS Global offering.

For St. Jacobs ABC that means acquiring “type” oriented bulls. “Our mission at St. Jacobs is very simple,” says St. Jacobs General Manager Tim Abbott. “Provide a quality product that customers around the world want that may be different than most A.I. com-panies are willing to provide.”

St. Jacobs buys and samples 14 young bulls per year – four Holstein bulls for the joint ABS Canada/St. Jacobs young sire progeny test program called “Cornerstone”; four Holstein and two Jersey bulls for the “Judge’s Choice” program; and four bulls for the Red & White Holstein program. The Cornerstone bulls are sampled in Canada only, while the remainder are sampled globally.

St. Jacobs is responsible for all of their bulls until they are proven. Once a St. Jacobs bull has been returned to service, then ABS takes over the marketing and promotion of that bull.

“For the Judge’s Choice program,” explains Abbott, “we are looking for sons of the top show cows in the world. The cow needs to, in our minds, be a champion or future champion at the Royal Winter Fair or World Dairy Expo. We are hoping in the future to expand our consideration to great champions in other countries as well. We require the cow to have a strong pedigree and a sire stack that appeals to us. The Red and White program has a focus on high type sires and maternal lines with strong butterfat potential. Again, show cows with deep pedigrees are our preference. For our Cornerstone program we look for high reliability sire stacks from proven maternal lines in hopes of getting a top end LPI bull. We prefer to buy all of our bulls on the ground, rather than special mate them.”

All three young sire proving programs have been very successful.  The Cornerstone program, for example, has graduated such bulls as Indianhead Red-Marker-ET and Regancrest Dundee-ET. The Judge’s Choice program, which was initially started by ABS Global, was turned over to St. Jacobs to manage in 2001 because of their closer ties to “type”. Under the Judge’s Choice program a panel of four show judges – Callum McKinven from Quebec, Ken Empey from Ontario, Chris Hill from Maryland and Hank Van Exel from California – help the St. Jacobs Sire Committee to chose young bulls who they feel will improve a breeder’s chance of breeding a show winner. This program has produced such bulls as Markwell Kite, Carrousel Distrigene-Red-ET and BKB Affirmed. “We owe a great deal of gratitude to the judges who make up our Judge’s Choice Committee as they are much of the reason behind our success,” says Abbott. St. Jacobs skill in handling this program prompted ABS in 2005 to turn over the Red & White program to them as well.

ABS samples eight young bulls in Canada through the Cornerstone pro-gram. In North America, it samples about 300 bulls in total per year. ABS Global’s aim is to have bulls that will fit the needs of every dairyman. “We want something for everyone,” says ABS Canada’s Darren Fehr, “be that a pro-duction bull, type bull, show bull or high fertility bull…and all of that wrap-ped up in longevity and profitability.”

The strength of St. Jacobs and ABS’s young sires and proven bull offering has ensured strong semen sales for both companies. Last year ABS Global sold 10.5 million units of semen globally (the bulk of this dairy), with semen marketed to more than 75 countries. Of this, some 330,000 units of semen were from St. Jacobs ABC.

The St. Jacobs and ABS bulls are housed in either Ontario, Wisconsin or the United Kingdom, depending on where they have been sourced, their health status and marketability. ABS Global, because it does not want to keep all of its bull population in Wisconsin, has bulls in six locations around the world. Every third month it sends 20 bulls to Ontario for housing. Here in Canada there are 60-80 bulls housed at the Elmira facility, while another 15-20 bulls reside in an isolation facility at Alma, Ont. A rearing facility at Durham, Ont., which was formerly the Walton Sale Arena, houses another 225 bulls. Harold and Lois Wright own this facility and provide the feed and labour for these bulls. All of the semen collection in Ontario is performed at the Elmira stud where about 2 million doses of semen are collected per year.

ABS has developed a number of management programs, services and products which it offers in Canada under the ABS Canada/St. Jacobs ABC banner. For example, they have a mating service called Genetic Management System (GMS). They sell a teat dip con-ditioner called “Emerald”. Earlier this year, they started to sell sex sorted semen under the trade name ABS Sexation™. They also provide technician and insemination service in various parts of Canada as well.

A newer service which is really taking off is the Reproductive Management System (RMS®), a program which focuses on maximizing a herd’s reproductive results. With many farms today facing labour shortages, dairymen often lack the necessary time to properly do heat detection in their herds. RMS provides a solution to that problem. RMS is a full service reproductive program which can include data analysis, daily heat detec-tion, insemination service, data entry, synchronization facilitation, trou-bleshooting, performance measurement and consultation with the farmer and his herd veterinarian and nutritionist.

As part of this service a trained ABS Reproductive Specialist visits the farm every day and physically looks at every cow and heifer in the herd for evidence of heat. With better heat detection, pregnancy rates go up and financial returns increase. RMS was initially started by ABS in the U.S. several years ago and today over 700,000 cows a day are seen in the program. RMS was introduced in Canada three years ago and already 8000 animals are being observed daily. “The return from RMS is unbelievable,” states Peter Draper who says the program is proving popular in both large and small size herds.

The bond between ABS/St. Jacobs is indeed very unique, but the benefits of this genetic partnership have been enormous for both.

“I think the big benefit for St. Jacobs is the huge marketing arm that ABS has for us,” says Keith Wideman, St. Jacobs ABC Board president who farms in partner-ship with his brother Neil at Early Rise Jersey Farms, Elmira, Ont. “Their mar-keting arm is global and that is fantastic for us.”

ABS also brings to St. Jacobs its strength in research and development and management programs. ABS invests between $15-25 million in research and product development every year. While the bulk of that research right now is in genomics, other bovine areas are also studied. ABS’s management services, such as RMS and GMS, are backed by a strong technical service team which “is a huge benefit to producers in Canada,” says Darren Fehr. “We have the bulls, but we also have the program strength and support.” 

St. Jacobs, on the other hand, brings to ABS a different kind of product – bulls that are outside the mainstream bulls at ABS and that fit the “type” market. As a  result, “ABS has never had a higher emphasis on type than it does now,” says Peter Draper. “Having St. Jacobs with ABS,” adds Darren Fehr, “also gives us the feedback we require from producers to test bulls in Canada. I have always been a believer that the producers buying our semen need to tell us what kind of progeny they want. Having St. Jacobs together with us, gives us that.”

Fehr goes on to say, “There is an enormous amount of respect between ABS and St. Jacobs. The organizations have their respective strengths and we love how this partnership builds on those strengths. ABS is able to offer a unique product that is more show type or pedigree orientated from St. Jacobs, while the ABS product places greater emphasis on productive life, fitness and overall performance traits.”

While pleased with their achieve-ments, the two companies continue to look for new opportunities and ways to grow. Focusing on the “needs of the customer” will remain a priority say both Fehr and Draper. “We have tried to build a company that provides products and services that people want by lis-tening to them and then customizing our programs, progeny testing and services to meet what farmers need.”

Keith Wideman believes the future for St. Jacobs has never looked brighter. “We have a good foundation now and want to keep moving forward. The best way to do that is to continue to provide breeders with the kind of bulls we know they are looking for from St. Jacobs ABC. And that is the higher type bull. Because it is the higher type bull that will give every dairy producer, be they a large commercial herd or a smaller dairy, the opportunity to breed a show winner.” Tim Abbott agrees. “We hope to build off our success and make our programs bigger as markets demand. We want to make our business as stable as possible by expanding more into other breeds like Red and White and Jerseys. We are as well always on the lookout for businesses that would compliment our current business.”

The ABS Canada/St. Jacobs ABC partnership works. Why? “Two reasons,” concludes Abbott. “First we need each other. ABS recognizes that there is tremendous need for the product that St. Jacobs provides and that St. Jacobs has been very successful developing. St. Jacobs realizes ABS is one of the most powerful marketing arms in the world, so the two fit hand in glove. The second is people. Our people all work together to blend the two companies together.” ABS’s Darren Fehr concurs. “We like what each other brings to the table. And we all love cows. But in the end it is ultimately the people who make it work so well.” People, bulls, programs…it is what has made ABS Canada/St. Jacobs ABC a success story here in Canada.