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Making improvements in dairy herd fertility performance must be a two-pronged approach. Using genetics to improve cow fertility by selecting bulls with high fertility is undoubtedly a long-term strategy, with five to eight years needed to reap the benefits.
However, in the short term, much can be done to make fertility gains, with some of the Dairylink project farmers focusing on issues like heat detection, rearing heifers properly and using fertility measures to help improve fertility on-farm.
Poor conception rates, extended calving intervals, and low in-calf rates are all common fertility problems for dairy farmers.
Many of the Dairylink Ireland project farms are no different, with problems ranging from spread calving patterns to poor heat detection.
The one common problem for all farmers with poor fertility is the cost of infertility to the business. Costs range from £3 to £10 per cow per day not in calf, depending on the milk price and cull cow price used in the calculation. In this article, David Brady outlines how his spring-calving herd has performed.
Currently, individual cow output on our farm is 14 litres at 4% protein and 4.62% fat (1.3kg MS). It is fair to say that generally the herd is on the wind-down. Cows were housed last weekend with very heavy downpours of rain but got back out this week. We are grazing the paddocks with heavy grass covers.
Cows are on 3kg concentrate with 15kg of grazed grass.
We started closing paddocks on 5 October this year and plan to have 65% of the farm closed by the 1 November. A few wet days have slowed progress in grazing over the past two weeks, but we only have three more heavy cover paddocks on the platform.
The rest will be easy to graze, even if conditions deteriorate. We will close the parlour down in December. However, we have only 40 cubicles beside the parlour, and the remaining cubicles are 1km away. We hope to have half the herd dry by the time all cows are housed and will start to dry off low-condition and low yielders at the start of November to facilitate this and reduce the workload walking cows to and from the parlour.
Fertility update
Milk test results indicate an empty rate of 10% for the milking cows, we haven’t scanned the heifers yet, but see no signs of heat in this group. In total, we bred 80 cows and 21 heifers starting on 1 May this year. Breeding lasted 14 weeks, with only two cows served in the final week. For the first eight weeks we used black and white EBI sires, the remainder were covered with beef sires. Heifers got easy- calving EBI semen, with a sire called LWR used on heifers. Herd fertility has improved in the herd but more improvement is needed.
A total of 18 cows will be culled this year. This is made up of eight empty cows, four late calvers – which are not going to fit into my system – two repeat mastitis cows, one cow with lameness issues, and three more with udder problems. This takes my replacement rate to 22.5%, which excludes any issues with replacement heifers. We have 21 heifers to be brought into the herd next spring, so our herd size will not expand next year.
Given our investment in the grazing platform and based on the advice I am getting from our Dairylink adviser, I am clear the farm can carry more cows. Average growth this year was 9.5t DM/ha on the platform with 15ha reseeded during this period, so I can expect an even better growth next year from the reseed and the improved soil fertility on the farm. Realistically, we will have to purchase stock to allow the farm to capitalise on the investment into the grazing platform.
The other alternative is to give up some rented land, effectively reducing my overhead cost base and increasing the stocking rate on the farm. The farm is quite well set up now, and carrying 10/15 additional cows will not significantly change labour demand or workload on the farm.
Heifer update
The younger heifers on the farm born in February /March this year still have a big weight range. The weigh results for 20 July highlighted a range of 40kg – from 130kg to 170kg each. These heifers will be weighed again next week when coming into the house; visually the range in weight is still in the group.
We plan to group these heifers into pens with eight in each pen throughout the housing period. The lighter two groups will receive 2kg to 3kg/head of concentrate. This system worked well for us last year. We could probably have done more during the summer to narrow the weight gap with the group, but it’s not as easy when heifers are away from the farm. Average weights of both groups of heifers are in table below.
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