Thanks to over 250 of our dairy farmers who came out to celebrate the end of the season at our recent Repro Round Up events in Winton, Gore and Balclutha (a new location this year).
It was awesome to have a night off-farm and enjoy a meal together. During each evening, Line Ferriman spoke about the innovative CowSmart data analysis service, and Jess Wallace shared her riveting life story that led her to run Surfing for Farmers in Southland.
We provided farmers who’d scanned with us an info pack, including graphs benchmarking their farm’s repro results, and we presented the overall results for the year with insights from our vets. We also gave out awards for those farms with outstanding results or improvements.
One of the interesting things we looked at during the Winton event was how the average 6-week in-calf rate (ICR) had changed over the last 12 years. There have been ups and downs, which is no surprise with so many things influencing fertility, but it was great to see the trend has generally been upwards.
Many of us expected reproductive results to be affected by the wet start to the season. However, the average 6-week ICR was 69%, which equalled last year’s result (Winton’s highest result to date). With an industry target of 78% (what the top NZ herds achieve), an average across all our herds of 69% is fantastic. It’s rewarding to see the hard work farmers put in to keep cows healthy pay off, despite the bad start.
At the Gore event we talked about how we think 3-week ICR should be given more focus by the industry. Our clients were excited to hear that our farms made another improvement this year, even after breaking the record last year, to achieve an excellent average 3-week ICR of 47%. The industry target is 53%.
Particularly intriguing, after many years of analysis, Gore farms with wearable tech out-performed farms without wearable tech (the humans do the heat detecting) for the first time. Wearable farms had an average 3-week ICR of 48.5% vs. non-wearable farms who averaged 46% for their 3-week ICR.
Given it was the first year of holding an event in Balclutha, it was amazing to see it so well supported. We were also surprised to see how well these local farms performed given the immense challenges last spring. It was good to have a discussion around reproduction while looking at the results, and it was great to see everyone catching up with friends and neighbours.
The gears are already turning with ideas for next year’s events. We can’t wait to see you there.
