As the breeding season gets underway on farms it is important that submission rates are monitored to ensure that targets are met.
The target for the majority of Irish dairy herds should be to have 90% of the cows calving in first six weeks of the calving season.
This is not easy to achieve and requires a lot of work to ensure that enough cows are served within the first six weeks of breeding.
Monitoring submission
The target is to have 90% of your cows submitted for breeding in the first three weeks of the breeding season.
This means that you need to be breeding, on average, 4.3% of the herd each day in the first 21 days.
For a 100-cow herd, this equates to a little over four cows/day.
Obviously not all of these cows will hold to first serve, but the fact that they have been served within the first three weeks means that they should cycle again within 21 days.
This in turn means that they have been given two opportunities to go in calf within the first six weeks of breeding.
It is important to note that although you have submitted cows for breeding, they should only be included in this figure if they were actually bred.
Some cows may have been submitted but they weren’t actually cycling or had already been bred in recent days.
Breeding season
After the first three weeks have been completed you need to then start looking at the cows that have not been bred yet.
If these cows have not cycled – and they should have done so by now – they need to be checked by the vet as quickly as possible.
The longer these cows are left, the later in the calving season they will calve down or potentially, they will slip out of the system altogether.