Booking In A Pregnancy Testing Date
/Everyone is now fully aware of the tremendous benefits of doing an early aged pregnancy test - these include:
- Providing information for strategic dry off dates
- Aiding in early culling decisions for destocking in Autumn
- 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
- Detailed reproductive analysis to help guide where continued future improvements may be made
- Bench marking against the rest of the district
- Improving the saleability of a herd
- Identification of cows which have received multiple inseminations but conceived to the first mating
- Ranking cows for culling
- Accurately identifying cows which conceived in the early bull mating period
- Provision of detailed supportive material for possible induction dispensation requests
To provide this information accurately cows should be pregnancy tested 12-15 weeks after the PSM date. For a herd which started mating on the 23rd of October this would be between the 15th of January and the 5th of February. The accuracy when dating pregnancies beyond 15 weeks start to diminish. Herds should have had bulls removed for at least 40 days before an empty diagnosis can be confidently made.
For herds which are limiting their mating period to strictly 10 weeks it would be possible to do a singular test at 15-15.5 weeks after the PSM. The reality however is that it would not be possible to get all herds tested in the district within this very tight time frame. We ask therefore that farms stick with the existing program of testing between 12-15 weeks after the PSM. Cows identified as rechecks can then be simply drafted out for retesting 40 plus days after bulls removal.
