Scanning Results 2022
The reality is, it doesn't matter what your neighbor is doing or how you compare - you need to know how your own farm is performing and what your own targets are for each season. The advantage of early scanning/dating and recording through MINDA is that we can look at this information, in much greater depth and start to pull out the focus areas for you. For some farms this may be a lack of bull power, others maybe the young animals are performing poorly, due to not meeting target live weights at breeding. Please speak to us if you would like to have a more in depth review of your farms reproductive performance. That said, it is interesting to pool the data to look for trends and get a measure of overall performance for the season. Here we have looked at the key measures of fertility across all our clients who scan with us.
Empty Rate V Mating Length
In this graph we can see the unsurprising trend that as mating length increases the empty rate generally decreases. That's why any discussions about empty rate need to take mating length into account. For those of you that have shortened mating right down to 8-10 weeks expecting a <5% empty rate is likely unobtainable.
Has this year been worse than last year?!
The short answer is NO! Some people have improved their performance, others have mirrored last years performance and some have had a bad year. This has meant that on average the 6 week in calf rate is on a par with last years result. Most farms have room to improve to meet the 78% target here.
What about conception?
Overall the average conception rate has dropped by around 5%. This is likely to be due to a number of factors and will be different on every farm but inadequate nutrition, particularly energy deficit across the early mating window could be to blame. Cow condition, condition loss, heat detection accuracy, mating frequency and production levels could also be factors resulting in lower conception rates.
And finally...
Mating periods are generally getting shorter as more and more people favour a compact calving period. On average people did a week less this season than last season. Regional trends may be different but for our clients the overall empty rate has only changed by a % point between this season and last season.