Rozelyn Farm’s ‘super cow’ impacting Guernsey breed

By Calvin Bratt

“Your super cow” is how others have put it to Leon Zweegman. Oh, that one.

The standout Guernsey cow from Rozelyn Farm of Lynden has a name, Villa, and she has an age, which will be 13 next October. (That’s pushing 60 in human years.) And she also has a classification rating of Excellent-94, the upper echelon of dairy cattle pedigree.

But Villa is no longer among the other Guernseys on the fourth- generation Double Ditch Road farm. She has graduated. In 2021, Leon sold the cow into a partnership to more successfully maximize her genetic potential.

It’s easy for the average person to get lost in the terminology of the world of dairy cattle quality. Leon, in his 52nd year of running Rozelyn, is well-versed in the lingo.

He builds on the farm foundation established by his father and grandfather, who came to Washington in 1901 from Nebraska.

Of this super cow, Villa, “she goes back to my grandpa’s Guernseys, 30 generations,” Zweegman says.

There was a time when the brown-and-white Guernsey was the most visible dairy breed in Whatcom County and elsewhere. Not anymore.

Rozelyn has added the black-andwhite Holsteins to the farm. But the joy of propagating Guernseys is clearly what motivates Leon.

Five beautiful little Guernsey calves, including a set of twins, were in the heifer pens in March.

“That’s why I’m still doing this. Otherwise I should quit,” says the 76-year-old.

Actually, Villa is not the only standout Guernsey cow carrying the Rozelyn tag. She has a distant cousin named Velmay, born just four days before Villa, on Sept. 27, 2010, and Velmay also is classified as an Excellent-94. Velmay rests comfortably on the Lynden farm and is due to calve in May, like Villa also in her 13th year.

It so happens that Leon is applying for the “living lifetime” honor for

Velmay among all current Guernseys in the United States. That signifies highest cumulative milk, butterfat and protein production for a cow. Because of difficulty in getting her bred, Velmay recently went 1,113 days in one lactation, producing 65,630 pounds of milk in three years.

Back to Villa, she has two daughters that remain on the Zweegman premises, named Villamae and Vella. Another daughter, Vianne, has been sold to a dairy in Ohio. All the V names? They indicate the line of cows going back so many generations to Leon’s grandfather’s first breeding efforts. Already by 2018 Villa had won the “total performance” title among Guernsey cows in the United States. She drew broader attention at a national convention. (Leon estimates there are about 300 registered Guernsey farms in the U.S., plus ones in Canada, England, South Africa and elsewhere.)

Locally, only limited success could be obtained at super-ovulation and embryo flushing of Villa. The transfer to Wisconsin, with global dairy manager Jim Van Patter leading the way, brought dramatic results.

Villa has now produced as many as 272 embryos.

“It’s just blown us all away,” Zweegman said.

Using capabilities of TransOva Genetics, Villa is flushed about every two weeks, Van Patter said. The ovocytes obtained are then in-vitro fertilized to create embryos, which can be frozen but ultimately are implanted into host animals for birthing. He works with an associated farm of 2,700 cows.

Van Patter said that Villa could be the top Guernsey cow in the world when looking at genomics, milk productivity and now offspring, combined. “She going to make a big impact” on the breed, he said. “She’s pretty amazing.”

Van Patter -- who first visited northwest Washington dairies in the 1980s -- credits that to the good breeding Leon Zweegman has done across the years, of developing Rozelyn cows that are strong, rugged, high milk-producing and now high in production of offspring.