Across all the regions we service, we’re seeing a big increase in dairy farmers wanting to do phantom scanning.
In our East and South Otago hubs (which includes our Gore, Tapanui, and Balclutha clinics), we had 18 farms do at least one phantom scan this season – and several did up to four scans to catch as many phantoms as possible!
The outcomes from these scans:
A total of 11,438 cows were scanned from late November to early January to identify any phantom pregnancies.
573 cows were phantoms – a 5% prevalence average across the farms (the range within individual herds was 3-19%).
Identified phantoms were treated either with a CIDR programme (83%) or a PG injection (17%).
At the time of writing this, we had pregnancy test results for 507 of these phantom cows, which showed...
This is an improvement on phantom cow results from the East and South Otago last season, where out of 228 phantoms (which was also a 5% prevalence average across the mobs scanned), 47% got pregnant after treatment and 49% ended up empty.
Once again, the results are clear. There is value in scanning for phantoms and intervening while there is still time to get them in-calf.
