Jakob Lykke Voergaard is our new Senior Breeding Product Manager for VikingRed. Voergaard (41) is married to Annette, they have two girls Rebekka (7), and Nikoline,(4). He was raised on a farm with 35-45 Holstein cows in the east central Jutland in Denmark. Even as a child, he liked to be surrounded by the cows and working in the barn. His first contact with breeding advice was when he was a teenager: “I would always want to be the one who met and talked with the breeding advisors when they visited my parents,” he recalls.
Before starting on the road to becoming a breeding advisor by studying Animal Science at University, Voergaard spent a year in Australia. “I worked with sheep and driving tractors as milking cows was something I had already done plenty of at my parents’ farm,” he laughs.
Voergaard completed his five-year Animal Science degree at the University of Copenhagen, specialising in breeding. Shortly afterwards, in 2008, he joined VikingDenmark, as an advisor.
“Around half of the farms I visited as an advisor had VikingRed cows. That was when I first came in contact with this breed, and fell in love with the philosophy behind it; they are cows that are easier to work with, they may not be the highest producers, but they are so healthy, that they are as profitable as you can get,” he says.
Voergaard now heads the VikingRed breeding goal at VikingGenetics. He officially took over the reins as Senior Breeding Product Manager on 1st January 2020, but had been covering the area since June last year. Voergaard says he wants to continue improving the breeding goal for VikingRed of his predecessor Auli Himanen, who retired this year.
