With the dairy breeding season having commenced, regular and effective heat detection is critical in order to hit the key breeding performance indicators.
Central to achieving the desired 90% 6-week calving rate, a 365-day calving interval and a planned empty rate of less than 8% over a 12-week breeding season is effective heat detection.
Where heat detection is lacking, you run the risk of missing a heat, thus delaying a cow calving next season, or inseminating at the incorrect time which will also have a knock-on effect on the reproductive performance of your herd. The latter is critical, especially given the importance of timing with the use of sexed semen.
To ensure effective heat detection, dairy farmers must be aware of the heat activity of dairy cows at pasture, an area studied by Dr. Stephen Moore in Moorepark over recent years.
A summary of this research: on average, increased activity associated with heat lasted for 17.2 hours while mounting activity lasted for an average of 8.7 hours. However, there was considerable variation between cows in the duration of both heat activity and standing heat as shown in Figure 1.
A key message stemming from this research: the duration of standing heat was for less than 8 hours in 55% of the cows. The implication of this finding is that the use of heat detection aids is absolutely critical to achieving a high heat detection rate. Old research from the 1990’s supports this finding in that compared to three times daily heat detection, the use of an aid increased heat detection rate by 20%.
Given the above, the use of heat detection aids is recommended as an effective solution at increasing heat detection rate. Some examples include:
- Tail paint should be applied as a narrow strip (50mm wide and 200mm long) and topped up at least once weekly. The biggest mistake that’s made with it is that it’s not topped up regularly enough.
- Scratch cards are well proven particularly with maiden heifers. Cards can be lost if excess winter hair at the tail head is not removed before sticking them on.
- Electronic activity monitors can be used to maintain the efficiency while reducing the labour required in heat detection.
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