The breeding season on autumn-calving herds will be starting in the coming weeks,, so the setting of breeding targets is important.
The main aim of this year’s breeding season should be to improve milk solids and fertility within the herd.
The way that this can be achieved in the shortest manner is by breeding from the top animals in the herd to generate replacements.
Milk recording
Milk recording and calving reports should be used to identify cows that are to be used to generate replacements and achieve breeding targets.
Poorer performing cows should be bred to a beef bull or marked for culling; these could include cows that are producing low levels of milk solids, poor fertility, lameness issues and high somatic cell counts (SCC).
The best genetic animals on the farm should be your heifers, so obtaining replacements from these animals will accelerate genetic gain.
Breeding targets
The breeding target for each herd is different, but Teagasc recommends the selection of a panel (seven to eight) high economic breeding index (EBI) (>€280) sires from the active bull list.
The team of bulls should be balanced for both the milk (>€100) and fertility (>€100) subindexes.
You should target a high combined kg of milk solids (>30kg) in the team, while holding the milk volume proof at 80-160kg with high fat (>0.20) and protein (>0.15) potential.
You should also be trying to increase the number of cows calving in the first six-weeks of the breeding season.
The number you are calving will depend on the number of cows required to meet your winter milk contract.
To achieve a compact calving you need to be serving as many cows as possible in the first three-weeks of the breeding season.
The target for a spring-calving herd is to serve 90% of cows in the first three weeks, which means you need to be serving about 4.3% of the herd each day. This may not be feasible for winter milk herd.
But, having a more compact calving will condense the workload and will mean you have more cows at the same stage of lactation.