Body condition score

There is roughly one month to go before the start of the main breeding season. Next week’s paper will have the spring AI focus with the new active bull list and breeding-related articles. The best thing you can do in advance of the breeding season is to have your cows in good body condition score (BCS). Now is a good time to BCS all the cows in the herd, even those not yet calved. The most at risk cows are those at 2.5 and below. I would also consider cows at 2.75 but heading to 2.5 as being at risk also. These cows are under pressure. The research is clear that it is BCS loss that is a major cause of infertility. So how can you reduce BCS loss now or help those low cows to gain BCS?

Nutrition has a big part to play. Getting as much high-quality grass into these cows as possible will help to put them into a positive energy balance. In a lot of cases these cows are challenged from one thing or another such as lameness, infection, recovering from a hard calving etc. This might affect their ability to get the same grass intake as other cows. Feeding these cows a bit of extra meal or grazing them separately might be a help. However, feeding more meal to cows that are thin because they are producing a lot of milk is probably counter-productive because they’ll just produce even more milk.

Putting these at-risk cows on once a day (OAD) milking will also help to improve their energy balance. Keep them on OAD from now until three weeks after they have been bred. Late-calving cows should also be put on OAD. In many cases the late calvers are getting too fat and are at greater risk of metabolic problems after calving. It would be no harm to restrict silage to the late calvers.

Reseeding

It might seem early to be thinking about reseeding but you’ll start to see fields being burned off within the next fortnight. Milking cows are not supposed to graze fields that have been sprayed off with glyphosate. The optics of seeing animals graze burned off fields aren’t good, regardless of what the science says. Best policy is to cut the grass on these fields and make bale silage, which can be fed to dry cows or cattle next winter. This policy might also help to give a lower residual prior to cultivating.

What fields for reseeding? The general advice is to pick low-yielding paddocks but really you need to investigate why it’s low as sometimes it’s not just a variety issue – it could be soil fertility, timing of grazings, drainage, etc.

Teaser bulls

There seems to be an increase in the number of farmers using vasectomised bulls or teaser bulls. They are most useful as an aid to heat detection for heifers or for cows after the first three weeks is up.

They also facilitate an increase in the use of beef AI as some farmers will continue to use AI later into the breeding season as they find the bull good at picking up cows in heat, at a time when general activity declines. The surgery for teaser bulls should be completed six to eight weeks before he is put to work.