Finish your breeding season on a high
As the breeding season for spring-calving herds heads into its final month, Teagasc Dairy Specialist, Stuart Childs explains why it is important that dairy farmers keep up the momentum and capture as many repeats to minimise empty rates at the end of a defined breeding season.
The industry standard for breeding season length in seasonal calving systems is 12 weeks. Where submission rates are excellent and herd fertility is such that very high conception rates are achieved, some farms are now running shorter breeding seasons of anywhere between 9 and 11 weeks.
Just as breeding season length is an important target for dairy farmers, dairy-beef farmers too require a tight calving season to maximise the grazing potential of the stock that they purchase from dairy farms.
Extending the breeding season beyond the 12 week window will increase the number of cows in calf at the end of breeding, as cows have more chances to go in calf. Equally, however, it lengthens the calving season in 2025, which starts the rat race all over again next year.
Late-calving cows have dramatically shorter lactations where they are dried around Christmas, and will have to be milked for much of the winter in order to achieve anything like the desired lactation length required to make a return on calving them in the first place.
Consequently, every effort must be made in the next number of weeks to get any cows not yet submitted bred as early as possible. Good heat detection is also required to capture any repeats. This coupled with a defined end to the breeding season will help to reduce the impact of shortening the breeding season in 2024, where extended breeding seasons have been the norm in the past.
If a herd has a high proportion of late-calving cows, there are two options:
- Do not breed these cows and replace with an early-calved heifer in 2024 (assuming sufficient heifers available (homebred or could be sourced externally);
- Shorten the breeding season incrementally over a number of years (one week per year).
While heifers will have lower output due to their age, early calving will see them produce as much as a late-calving cow dried early, so this option is worth considering given the likely availability of high-quality, early-calving heifers.
Beef breeding
Any cows bred in the last few weeks of the defined 12 week breeding season will be bred to beef - either through beef AI or through beef stock bulls. It is essential that dairy farmers do their utmost to produce high-quality beef calves for the dairy beef system that these calves will end up in.
However, the dairy farmer needs to put an equal amount of emphasis on the calving ease and gestation length of the bulls chosen in particular from now on in the breeding season. This is because of the negative impact of both calving difficulty and lengthy gestation periods on subsequent breeding seasons.
Dairy farmer’s objectives from now on should be to use short-gestation, proven easy-calving, high carcass weight bulls, such as Angus, Hereford or Belgian Blue, that will calve on time and generate calves that will perform in dairy-beef systems.
For more information of what figures to target, Alan Dillon, DairyBeef 500 Campaign Co-Ordinator, joins Stuart Childs on this week’s Dairy Edge podcast to discuss late breeding season bull choice.
Listen in below:
Alternatively, visit the dedicated DairyBeef Village at BEEF2024, taking place at Teagasc Grange on, Thursday, June 26. Find out more about BEEF2024 here.