It’s great to see cattle producers continuing to enjoy good prices this year. One thing this means is that every extra calf is even more valuable, and so it pays to maximise your herd’s reproductive performance.
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Many producers in our area join cattle in October or November for a spring calving, in order to match feed requirements with pasture availability. For these people, pregnancy testing often occurs at this time of year.
Pregnancy testing in cattle is a valuable way of tracking your herd’s reproductive performance, and allows you to offload empty cattle (it doesn’t usually make much sense to feed a cow for 9 months if she isn’t going to produce a calf at the end of it).
Pregnancy testing is a valuable way of tracking your herd’s reproductive performance, and allows you to offload empty cattle
- LLS district vet, Nigel Gillan
Unfortunately, pregnancy testing occasionally reveals a poor conception rate – hearing the “empty” call from your vet more than a couple of times begins to make most people a little nervous. It certainly isn’t a good feeling to be left with 20-30% empty cows in a mob.
Although the damage has already been done at this point, I do recommend that poor pregnancy testing results are investigated. Finding out why the problem occurred isn’t going to get you any extra calves this time, but it might reveal something which can be managed for future joinings, saving you another big headache down the track.
The simplest example is fertility testing of bulls. If there’s any doubt about a particular bull, it makes perfect sense to get your vet to check things out. A dodgy bull isn’t worth keeping around. Besides a simple problem of bull infertility or structural problems, there are a huge range of issues which can impact reproduction. We have the ability to rule in or out a few of the common infectious causes of abortion using laboratory tests. Diseases can be easily checked by a veterinarian. Sometimes a specific cause isn’t found. Things like nutrition or some infectious diseases can cause a problem and yet may not be detectable by the time pregnancy testing has revealed the issue. Even so, it clearly makes sense to rule out some of the common problems if you can. It’s only the issues you know about which can be effectively managed in future.