Benefits of Early Aged Pregnancy Scanning

 

Of course, everyone is aware of the great benefits of early aged pregnancy testing (12 to 15 weeks after planned start of mating), these benefits include:

Providing information for strategic dry off dates

Organizing your tail end of season early, you can decide to milk later calving cows longer. Lactating cows eat approx. 6kg DM a day more than dry cows. At, for example, 30cents/kg DM this is $1.80/ day; a cost far outweighed by milk in the vat. Your later calving cows will likely be the highest producers in the herd later in the season.

Early culling decisions

After the first scan, you can identify cows that are not detectably pregnant i.e. rechecks. These cows will either be empty or late calving cows, so you can consider culling any older, low producers earlier before the cull cow price drops and any significant dry conditions arrive.

Manage body condition and late lactation feeding

Set your cows up better for next season. Heavily pregnant cows (the early calving cows) take longer to eat their daily ration and can’t compete with the later calving cows towards the end of the season. The end result is earlier calving cows tend to be lighter and later calving cows are often too fat at calving.

Efficiencies during the dry period

  • Formation of wintering groups for tailored feeding.

  • Feed budgeting for the winter period and early lactation.

  • Efficiency in time and transport logistics of cows from run-off back to milking platform.

  • Allocating cows to the springer mob is easy and accurate when you have calving dates for every animal.

A detailed reproductive analysis will help to find where continued future improvements can be made:

  • Your 6-week in-calf rate is the most powerful and useful indicator of reproductive performance.

  • Early scanning helps you to identify areas where you are performing well, and also sheds light on aspects where there is room for improvement.

  • You can also assess the impact of any management changes you may have made.

  • Value for money!!! Valuable information received early for little extra cost. In a herd with a 6-week in-calf rate of 70% you would expect to have only 20% of the herd needing to be rescanned depending on the timing of scanning and the length of mating.

Talk to one of our large animal vets today to book in your early scan and get the most value for money!