Many farms are gearing up for breeding in the next few weeks. For farms starting to calve in mid-February 2018, cows will need to be bred in the first week of May 2017. If you are using AI, cows should be tail-painted at this stage and heats should be recorded for ease of detection three weeks later. Tail painting will also mean you can investigate cows that haven’t been in heat before breeding commences. Some may require a wash-out or have other issues. With late-calving-cows, some farmers suck calves twice a day to break the maternal bond and bring cows into heat quicker. While this sounds like a huge amount of work, when cows and calves get used to the system, it can work quite well. When breeding does commence, make sure to keep accurate records, especially if you are using a stock bull to monitor fertility. Have you got a plan B if a stock bull gets hurt and is unable to serve cows?

Breeding heifers

Ideally, heifers should be bred to calve one to two weeks before the main herd, or at the very latest the first week of calving. Because of a heifer’s higher fertility, they provide an excellent opportunity to use AI and give you options to use high index replacement bulls on the herd, for example. One way of reducing the labour requirement around using AI is synchronisation, which can be used very successfully in heifers. A simple programme to follow is outlined in Table 1

Read more

Ten steps to achieving compact calving