Monitoring Dairy Herd Fertility Performance in the Modern Production Animal Practice

摘要

In the modern production animal practice, greater emphasis is being placed on herd health and production management (HHPM) as a more proactive service to dairy farm clients. HHPM involves a routine herd visit covering all aspects of cow health and welfare but a large part of this visit is usually devoted to fertility work. Historically this was confined to individual cow genital tract examination and treatment of 'problem' cows to determine fertility status. As well as these clinical skills, the importance of regular data analysis is fundamental to improving and monitoring fertility performance in dairy herds. Analysis of fertility data is often restricted to retrospective "outputs" such as calving index and calving to conception interval but also there are inherent issues with using cohort analysis and intervals between events. The use of software packages allow rapid analysis with the ability to produce powerful fertility monitoring reports but these need to be interpreted carefully and the practitioner should be aware of the data quality and how the indices are calculated.