With breeding season just around the corner, many dairy farmers’ attentions will be turning to ensuring that heat detection is to the max to get cows in calf efficiently.
With this in mind, Progressive Genetics has announced that it will be supplying Tailpainter products as part of a new deal with Tailpainter.com.
The Tailpainter – an innovative device designed by Cork farmer and technician Liam O’Keeffe to take the stress out of tail-painting – has become increasingly popular among dairy farmers in recent years.
The product, designed to allow farmers to apply tail paint from the pit of the parlour or from a short distance to the cow, will now be sold through Progressive Genetics channels.
Speaking to Agriland, Laurence Feeney of Progressive Genetics said: “We do a range of heat detection products and we have done for a number of years. We started stocking the Tailpainters only in the last couple of weeks and also the tail paint that the guys behind TailPainter have as well.
Those are new products for us. Where it came from essentially was a couple of our lads who have cows used the Tailpainter – and really like it.
“It makes the job easy. Anything that makes life easier is a good thing. A thing that can make even a 10-minute job into a five-minute job is a godsend. Stuff like that, if you make it easy it might get done.
“Especially with heat detection and things like that, guys always start the season full of enthusiasm and then a month into breeding are thinking ‘ah to hell with this’. If it keeps the enthusiasm going a little bit longer it’s good.”
Noting that the feedback Progressive has been getting about the breeding detection aid is that it’s a “nice device and its easy to use”, Laurence added:
“It’s not going to make tail-painting any better – but if it just makes it a bit easier to use and means that guys are more likely to top up tail painting you are going to get better results overall. It’s the convenience really.
The Progressive Genetics representative added that Tailpainter.com is also developing its own range of tail paint, adding that “hopefully there is an applicator bottle of tail paint that they will have available over the next couple of weeks”.
“That will be useful too. There are other similar products on the market but it’s nice to have an Irish supplier of them too.
“At the moment we’d be importing those products and it’s nice when an Irish lad goes and develops something; it’s good to support our own,” Laurence concluded.