Livestock Improvement Corporation Ltd (LIC) is a New Zealand farmer-owned cooperative that provides a range of solutions to improve the productivity and prosperity of farmers. LIC Australia is a wholly owned subsidiary of LIC.
Since the 1970’s LIC has been delivering the very best of LIC’s leading-edge dairy cattle genetics and solutions to farmers all over Australia whether they are in Tasmania or Gippsland, and by doing so, helping Australian farmers become more prosperous and productive towards a more secure future.
LIC has pioneered some of the biggest innovations that provide today’s farmers with a competitive edge, including the systematic testing of milk quality, Long Last Liquid (fresh) semen, DNA technology to genomically identify and help select elite sires; and more recently a short gestation bull team bred to deliver offspring up to 10 days early.
Today, LIC’s products and services include: dairy genetics, herd recording software, herd testing, DNA parentage verification, farm advisory services, integrated parlour automation systems and milk testing sensors.
- Three out of four New Zealand dairy cows are sired by an LIC bull
- Over 10 million milk samples are analysed by LIC’s herd testing service each year (collected from 8,100 herds)
- Over 4 million straws of fresh semen are despatched for insemination to cows all over NZ during spring mating period (135,000 straws on peak day)
- We export over 1 million straws of frozen semen to more than 20 countries around the world
- 827,000 animal samples (DNA and milk) are analysed each year for disease identification, gene testing and parentage verification
- LIC’s animal identification and information management system is used by the majority of NZ dairy farmers
Whatever the challenges of the times or the marketplace, our job will remain the same.
That job is to continue to improve the genetics of dairy cows globally, improve the information that farmers have and the way they use it, and improve profitability through smart and innovative technology. Because, as we all know, there’s always room for improvement.