Tim Sinnott milks 225 cows on an autumn block calving system in Warwickshire. Calving from July through to November with all fertility work done by the Genus Reproductive Management System (RMS) team. The cows are milked three times daily with yields at 12,700lts/cow milk sold which equates to 890kg milk solids sold per cow.
“In 2017 all milking cows were served with conventional dairy semen plus some Sexcel® semen on the odd cow and maiden heifers. This policy gave us too many surplus heifers, which impacted how well we were able to rear our replacements. This also gave us a large number of black and white bull calves to sell / give away!”
Therefore, in 2018 they decided to change their policy. Using the Genus ABS Herd Percentile Ranking (HPR), 100 Cows and heifers were ranked as genetically superior and due to calve in September. These animals were mated using only Sexcel® semen through the GMS mating program, with the target of producing 75 dairy heifers. The rest of the herd was served to British Blue or Aberdeen Angus in the maiden heifers.
“We used no conventional dairy semen for the first time. We have also been genomically testing the heifers, so next year we will be using the genomic data to rank the cows and determine which animals get dairy genetics.”
“The results have been very positive with Preg rates now at 29% compared to 26% in the previous year when using conventional black and white semen.”
“We have learnt that you need to be confident with your fertility. I feel that we are breeding fertility into the herd with our block calving pattern. The cows that we are serving to sexed semen are our most fertile cows and our future breeding animals because they are at the beginning of the calving pattern.”
“80% of our heifer replacements were born within the first six weeks of calving in 2019, which is a big improvement from 63% previously.”
“The most important benefits are profit margins which are improved by selling continental calves and not unwanted black and white bull calves.”
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cs@genusbreeding.co.uk