About

Nestled in the historic district of Toolamba in Victoria, Australia is a gem of a property called Binda Vale. This is a property established in the earliest days of European settlement in Northern Victoria. Tucked into the Goulburn River, boasting generous native forests, fertile soils and gently rolling landscape Binda Vale is home to Vala Holsteins - 100% owned by Alex Arena.

Here we aim to breed Holstein livestock drawn from many of the world's leading bloodlines. Due to Australia's quarantined borders and low animal disease status, Vala Holsteins is able to export high quality Australian-bred Holsteins to the world.

Our breeding philosophy is simple. We want to breed world-class Holsteins - animals that rank highly on a variety of indexes (e.g. GTPI, GLPI and BPI) so that they meet a variety of needs. We look towards producing well balanced Holsteins rather than extremes focused on certain traits at the expense of others. Animal health, fertility, longevity and calving ease are important to us - as are high milk components. For years we have been breeding for A2A2 and polled - the latter is very important to us because we feel that eliminating de-horning biologically is the right thing to do. As every dairy-farmer knows, high temperature and high humidity conditions stress dairy cattle tremendously. The Slick gene promises to provide a natural advantage to livestock under these adverse temperature and humidity conditions hence Vala Holsteins has chosen to emphasise the breeding of Slick genetics in order to accelerate the progress of Slick Holstein livestock.

At Vala Holsteins all of our pedigree livestock are registered and we genomically test all of them - we test males on both GTPI and BPI; and females on GTPI, GLPI and BPI. This means we base our pricing on known genetic value and you are buying based on facts - not on guesswork.