The breeding season seems to have gone very quiet all of a sudden, which is either a good thing because it means that everything I’ve served has held to the first service or it’s a bad thing because it means they are repeating but I’m not seeing them.

Either way there is not a lot I can do at the minute other than keep watching them and keep serving what I see on heat. I’ll give it another couple of weeks and scan anything served more than 30 days, this will give me some kind of an idea of where I stand.

I like to get my heifers calved at the start of the calving season so they have plenty of time to go back in calf and still not be running late in their second year.

I’ll keep on with AI until the end of February and then let the bull in with whatever has not proven in calf. I have the luxury of putting the bull in with the cows to mop up whatever the AI has missed - unfortunately I do not have the same luxury with my maiden heifers. For the second year I am relying solely on AI as I only have one bull on the farm, a terminal Charolais. Although he is easy enough calving, I don’t really want to be putting him with heifers that are going to calf at two years of age. It worked very well for me last year but relying totally on AI makes me a little nervous. I like to get my heifers calved at the start of the calving season so they have plenty of time to go back in calf and still not be running late in their second year. So if for any reason my heat detection is poor then I can end up wasting a potentially very good heifer by not getting her in calf on time.

Standing heats

All but one heifer has been inseminated once since the first of January and like the cows, things have now gone very quiet. I thought this was a good sign but when I say quiet, I’m not seeing any standing heats but I am seeing a lot of licking and resting of heads.

I got my AI man to handle a heifer that was displaying such behaviour, in order to see if she was in heat. He said she wasn’t, but she had been inseminated earlier and he was pretty sure that she also wasn’t in calf.

Like the cows, there is not a lot I can do at the minute other than keep observing, scan in a couple of weeks and see where I stand. I will probably synchronise anything that doesn’t scan in calf at that time. Sometimes with young heifers, they just haven’t started to cycle and the hormone injection helps to speed this up.

Hopefully there won't be too many needing this treatment.

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