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With the cost of milk production creeping ever higher these days all farmers are looking at areas of their business where they can improve performance. For example, experts estimate that the average cost of cow infertility is around 3ppl.

Roy Townsend milks 75 cows at Church Farm, Clapton On The Hill, Bourton On The Water in Gloucestershire. A couple of months back, he decided to freshen–up on his fertility knowledge by attending a First Milk Academy course run in conjunction with Kingshay.

Roy was particularly attracted to the course because of the Kingshay connection: “I’m a member and the quality of the information and advice that organisation puts out is fantastic. I knew the advice would be impartial, correct and pertinent.”

Practical

The four-day course was split over six weeks to cater for producers like Roy who is a one-man operation and was extremely practical and relevant to the farmers present.

"It covered all aspects of the fertility equation such as feeding, health, breeding, and climatic effects. The best fertility comes from having average competence in all of these areas rather than excelling in one but failing in the others and that was one of the things I learned,” he said.

“If most farmers are honest with themselves they will recognise that there are things they can do better around fertility. What tends to happen is that bad habits creep in slowly but unnoticed. There’s no ‘big bang’ problem that becomes easily and instantly visible. The course helps identify where those hidden bad habits may lurk and helps to correct them,” Roy added.

One of Roy’s main benefits from the course has been in record keeping and identification of how well he is doing on fertility.

Fertility Performance

“The paper techniques they teach you to monitor fertility performance are excellent. I’m not too good when it comes to a computer so I need to do things on paper. Using the techniques are really simple and very effective.”

These include the Q-Sum graph technique, where progress in fertility is effectively plotted by marking positive outcomes to the right of the previous event and a negative outcome to the left. Clearly if the chart continues to move to the right that’s a good sign, but if it starts to move to the left then something untoward is occurring and action can be taken.

“At a glance, it enables us to see where blips are coming into the system and to identify what we could do to address them,” he said.
It is a little too early to say what the full extent of the improvements from the training will be, but Roy is confident that he is already seeing cows bulling earlier than before.

The course also taught him to serve earlier, and now he is not leaving the cows until the next heat before service. He’s using cost-effective beef bull semen at the moment while he assesses what the conception rates will be under the new system. If the results are good he’ll move to more expensive Holstein semen.

“I would thoroughly recommend the course. There is no question that you come back feeling different. You will know more, and be more motivated to make positive change.”