Dairy cow fertility underpins the viability and productivity of our spring calving farm system. We aim to achieve:

• > 78%  6-week in-calf rate
• < 10% not-in-calf rate
• < 70 day calving period

Owl Farm uses all AB (artificial breeding) for mating; in 2019 we started using sexed semen on our top BW (Breeding Worth) cows and Wagyu semen to provide bull and heifer calves for a First Light contract.  This was extended in the 2020, 2021 and 2022 matings to include heifer synchrony and sexed semen to further reduce the number of bobby calves produced. In 2023 we used perfomance beef semen as an alternative to Wagyu selling our calves at 4-day old, 100kg weaned and in the Autumn for the 2024 calving season.

Our Planned Start of Mating (PSM) is the 25th September, for a Planned Start of Calving (PSC) of the 1st July.

Efforts to improve reproductive performance this year include:

• Cows are dried off on BCS targets relative to calving date
• All cows are metri-checked and treated
• Pre-mating heats recorded and CIDR programme used on approximately 15% of the herd)
• Halter is used for heat detection 

KEY STATISTICS from our most recent Fertility Focus Report and for previous seasons: