The national hall of fame awards took place in Athlone last month, recognising a lifetime of achievement across a number of cattle and sheep breeds.

The event also had a farmers ‘Oscar’ award, which was presented to Dr Dan Ryan in recognition of his award-winning innovative technology and his fertility management consultancy firm ReproDoc.

This company, along with his previous experience, has helped Dr Ryan to be acknowledged as a leading international scientist in preventative health management in beef and dairy cattle using the reproductive tract as a primary biomarker.

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Experience

In Saudi Arabia, Dr Ryan developed evaporative cooling systems for dairy cattle managed in arid climates in conjunction with Alastair and Paddy McGuckian in Massstock and Arizona State University.

This resulted in a 1.8-litre increase in milk production per cow per day and increased pregnancy rates from 15% to 35%.

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University, Dr Ryan developed a system for IVF in pregnant females which increased the opportunity to harvest genetics from superior females during their lifetime.

Dr Ryan continued his post-doctorate at Texas A&M University, where his research evaluated the impact of feeding high-fat diets for improved fertility in malnourished cows.

Dr Ryan returned to the National Dairy Research Centre in Moorepark in 1992. His pioneering research developed various hormonal programmes to increase submission rates and to decrease the calving to pregnancy interval.

The company ReproDoc was then set up in 1995 to offer preventative health management programmes, which identify stressors in the environment which negatively affect animal welfare, herd health and survivability.

The company now conducts in excess of 150,000 ultrasonographic assessments of the reproductive tract (USART) of cattle on an annual basis.

ReproDoc Ltd began a process to focus exclusively on the creation of hardware and software to bring computer-aided diagnosis to the field of bovine reproduction worldwide.

This led to the creation of CadMan, a software and hardware combination, which brings the application of automated vision recognition technology to the interpretation of bovine reproductive tract ultrasound examinations.

CadMan is the first application of computer-assisted diagnosis in this field and brings a step change in how cow fertility can be addressed.

This enabled the first non-subjective steps in generation of accurate management reports to orchestrate optimisation of preventative health management.

Today, these reports are communicated to customers via smart phones for access in real-time at cow-side. This form of communication facilitates proactive implementation of preventative health management plans.