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Healthy Hooves

Lameness is a major economic and welfare concern around the world, and NZ based systems are no exception. Whilst kiwi cows don’t spend the majority of their days standing on concrete, they can have big distances to walk and their feet still go through the same stressors during a normal milking. With the Healthy Hoof programme, we focus on the prevention of lameness with information and training on management and treatment. This will minimise the impacts of lameness on your cows, your staff and...

Is failure of passive transfer affecting your heifers?

Failure of Passive Transfer (FPT) occurs when calves fail to absorb sufficient quantities of immunoglobulin from colostrum in the first 24 hours of life.A recent New Zealand study indicates that, on average, about a third of calves (i.e. 33%) have FPT, but this prevalence varies widely between farms from 5% up to 80% of calves.Calves with FPT are immune compromised and, therefore, at a greater risk of disease and mortality. This effect is still evident at 12 months of age.Strategies to improve q...

Prep for pregnancy scanning

Large Animal Vet Claire shares her top tips for an easy scan. There’s a lot going on when heifers and cows are getting scanned. Numbers are getting thrown around all over the show: tag numbers, mating dates, days pregnant, the time the alarm went off to get on farm and so on. Here’s a list of things worth quickly thinking about before it’s your turn to scan. Anything that can help the scanning job go as smoothly as possible on the day, will help reduce the risk of scanning or recording err...

Scanning with Sunni

We talk all things scanning with large animal vet, Sunita McGrath. With our dairy and beef scanning seasons coming up, the team is busy training and getting fit to ensure they can continue to deliver the best scanning service. We caught up with largies vet Sunita, to find out why scanning is her favourite time of the year. Why do you love scanning so much, Sunni? "We work closely with the farmers to get to this point, it's like exam day and everyone gets a bit nervous! It is a great feeling to s...

Weigh It Up

An exciting new partnership with VetSouth and Weigh It Up.For a number of years now, Grant Heatherington has been servicing the deep south with his stock weighing service, Weigh It Up. Grant is based in Winton and we've worked alongside him over the years through his various roles, including with his Weigh It Up business. So we're stoked to announce that when Grant looked to his next venture in oyster shells, he first looked to us to help support him.So over the past months one of our experience...

Better genes through stud selection

When it comes to genes and stud selection, what is your top priority? If you can answer this you can work towards achieving it. This is especially true when you look at the performance of your stock. By identifying the things you want to work on, you will be able to purchase the genetics that will drive the improvement you are looking for. It’s not a one size fits all process - your focus will be different from other farmers. Which of these factors do you want? Bigger stockSmaller stock Better...

Clostridial and B12 vaccinations

Put your hand up if, every year in late summer, you have a beautiful mob of lambs ready to go to the works, then you find one or more suddenly dead in the paddock a few days before the truck comes? This tends to be relatively common on sheep farms, and also in some beef mobs too. This sudden death syndrome in fat, fast growing lambs is usually due to a clostridial bacteria causing Pulpy Kidney. It can also occur when lambs are on a high-octane summer crop. What can be done to prevent these death...

FEC drench check

“The objective of worm management is to minimize the impact of worms on animal performance while minimizing the selection for drench resistance” Beef & Lamb NZ 2013 Youngstock is the major contributor to worm populations in the paddocks. Any animals under 9 months old are highly susceptible to worms and so the traditional approach to drenching in many Southland farms has been to drench lambs at weaning time, right through until winter with a monthly drench. Going back to the objective of wo...

Fly Blow in the south: Prevalence, prevention and treatment

Flystrike is the most important external parasite of sheep in New Zealand, and yes, it's definitely in Southland. There are three species of blowflies that can initiate flystrike in sheep and two species that are secondary invaders. When and how does this happen? The main flystrike challenge period is November through to March. Adult flies and larvae, which have overwintered, become active and start to hatch once the soil temperature exceeds 12 degrees. Once you start seeing flies in your house ...

Growing great lambs

Today the sun is shining and I feel like I can hear the grass growing, so hopefully, a few more days like this and your lambs will be thriving. Lamb growth is influenced by feed, animal health, genetics, weather, and ewe condition/health. While the weather is out of your control, there are things you can do to manage lamb health. As we approach weaning, the risk factors for trace element deficiencies, some diseases, and stress increase. Lambs that grow faster will reach slaughter weights sooner,...

Quarantine drenching rams

Remembering to quarantine drench rams when they come on farm can be the biggest advantage to avoiding drench resistance. Creating worms resistant to drench takes time and we know there are lots of things we can do to slow it down as much as possible. In fact, the most likely way for drench resistance to fast track on your farm is to inadvertently buy it in. Any livestock brought on to your farm can be carrying problems you have been working to avoid. While store lambs and replacement hoggets ar...

Ram Run

With Summer just around the corner and mating following soon after, in February you will find many of our vets behind large numbers of rams having a good feel of their testicles. So why are we doing this? Ram testicles are not all the same, and they don’t all work from one year to the next. Ram palpations are a much more reliable way of predicting the likely fertility of your ram than a single semen sample. If your rams, and their testicles, are not in tip-top condition, you can be left with a...

Deworming horses

What are faecal egg counts and why do we do them? A faecal egg count (FEC) is an easy way to determine whether a horse needs to be drenched or not. It gives a reflection of a possible parasite burden and can sometimes give insight into which parasites your horse has. Vets use a FEC to give horse owners a recommendation on drenching and sometimes will also use it to give recommendations on which product to use. A FEC can also be used to see how effective the last drench was by testing a sample 1...

Submission rate

Now we are in the second half of November most dairy farms in the South your first 3 weeks of mating will be about done. For the most part, the arrival of better weather and improving cow condition has reduced the number of non-cyclers. This is great for two reasons. The most obvious is lower animal health costs, but even better than that is the cows we are treating we should see even better conception rates and so even higher return on the investment. To be on track for a successful mating the ...

Breeding beef

What options do you have with your beef breeding this year? Are you looking at using special genetics in your cows? Does having a condensed calving period have an advantage on your farm? There are a number of different options if you are keen to manage your beef breeding season differently this year. Artificial Insemination (AI) is an option in beef systems to bring in new genetics - without the cost of purchasing specialty bulls. We can prepare your cattle so that the AI can be done in one day....

BVD screening

Bovine Viral Diarrhoea (BVD) is a widespread viral disease which costs New Zealand agriculture (Beef and Dairy) $150 million in lost production, decreased reproduction and animal losses each year. It has been reported to cause an average of 5% decrease in pregnancy rate on affected farms. This is due to early embryonic deaths, mummified foetuses, abortions and reduced bull fertility. In calves the disease can cause scouring, poor growth, coughing, ulcers in the mouth, and lameness. Now is the id...

Calf rearing tips and tricks

At our ‘Wean Soirée’ events in Gore and Winton last year, some of our local calf rearers shared some of their challenges and key learnings. While many are out of their control - such as the weather - they shared a great list of things they do. The discussions, bubbles and food was great and an interesting challenge was the interference of fathers/husbands and grandfathers! The biggest takeaway tips and tricks suggested by the calf rearers were: Weak Calves Get poorly calves on electrolytes ...

Do you want improved conception rates?

Improved conception rates for non-cycler programmes with additional prostaglandin. Dairy cows that have not shown a heat prior to the planned start of mating have improved reproductive results when treated with a 10 day program involving progesterone (CIDR), GnRH, prostaglandin (PG) and eCG. This programme has formed the basis of our non-cycler treatment program since the ban of oestradiol benzoate in dairy cows in 2007. We have been achieving good conception rates to this program with an averag...

Get your info on track – make it easier and more accurate with Infovet!

Over 60% of our clients have signed up to Infovet, to realise the benefit of getting better data and easier for their herd health management. Infovet is an innovative software programme developed here in New Zealand to improve farm performance. By using Infovet (with you granting permission) we can provide you with a wealth of data, allowing accurate insights into herd health to drive farm profitability. The efficient nature of the system reduces the need for time consuming paperwork. Infovet as...

Maximising velvet growth

It’s well known that good nutrition is essential for maximum velvet growth. While this usually refers to energy and particularly protein, it’s important to also remember the role of trace elements in setting stags up to produce good velvet yields. For velvet production there are three trace elements that are thought to be most important – copper, zinc and manganese. Copper and zinc are the trace elements known to be critical for cell replication, and given that this is occurring more quick...

Pre-mating checklist

Get your mob ready for mating with this handy checklist. Use this handy checklist to make sure you don’t miss anything this season....

Pre-mating heat detection with tail paint

If you don’t want to deal with a prolonged mating period resulting in less milk next season, nor with ongoing non-cycling and mating costs, you need to get all of your cows in-calf early. Aim for these reproduction targets: A good conception rate of 55-60%A 3-week submission rate of around 90% Achieving these targets will put you on the right track to achieving the target 6 week in-calf rate of 78%. It can be difficult to directly change your conception rate, as many of the factors that affect...

Repro round up

Like many events this year, unfortunately due to the “C” word, we had to cancel our annual Repro Round up and Winter seminar night. For many, this is an event to mainly get off farm and have some good laughs with neighbours and friendly vet. Although we can’t get that much needed catch up back, we can still give you a summary of the repro performance from the 2019-20 season. As seen in the graphs below, it was a mixed bag of results for the season. For an average across all of the VetSouth...

The ins and outs of 'Dirty Cows'

What is metrichecking? Metrichecking is the examination of the vaginal discharge in a cow that has calved over 14 days ago, which looks for evidence of infection or slowed healing after calving. Why should you metricheck your herd? Cows have only a small window of time to recover fully from calving before they hit peak milking levels and the mating season. Infections after calving cause a delay in cycling and will also reduce conception rates. Sometimes the infection can spread deeper into the t...

Where do you want to be this repro season?

We all know the value of a successful repro season, where you can increase your in-calf rate, condense the calving period and get the production targets you want. So we have things to think about, and some targets you can consider - to discuss your farm situation call your KeyVet to discuss. How many metabolic/down cows? <3% Hopefully less than 3% needed treated - mark them and plan to support them through reproduction. If you have more than this call your vet to discuss a potential plan. ...