We are into week three of breeding in Clara this week, and with the weather picking up properly at last, we are seeing plenty of cows in heat every day.

This is keeping the drafting gate and AI flask very busy. We should hit or possibly even exceed our target of 90% served in the first three weeks with the cows.

The heifers have gone very well too, with just a few stragglers that didn’t show a heat yet left to serve this week. We brought the heifers back to the home farm for heat detection and breeding and moved them back to the outfarm as they were bred.

It was easier to run them into the crush at home every day than drive to the outfarm with the AI flask and all of the equipment. They will run with bulls now for the next six weeks to tidy them up.

The pre-breeding scan helped greatly to identify problem cows and to decide on a course of action with them as early as possible in the season.

Even more importantly, it selected out the cows that were suitable for sexed straws and these all got a sexed straw if they came bulling in the first week of the season.

A few cows that needed a washout after calving are still a bit slow coming around, but should get served next week.

We still have a few later calved cows too that will drift into weeks four and five of breeding before we will see them in the crush for service.

They should still get a few opportunities before the end of the season to hold in calf. Most of these will get beef straws from the start.

There seems to be a huge amount of sexed semen in use this spring across the country, which might be a bit of a risk after the tough weather conditions over the last two months, but hopefully it will work out well enough for everyone.

Risk factor

It’s still a bit of a risk factor and everything needs to be going very well for it to get a good enough strike rate.

There would also be a little concern in some quarters that young bulls with exceptional figures might be pushed into sexed semen production a little bit too early in their maturity timeline for the semen quality needed for that technology.

These bulls are in demand, so the pressure is on to get them into production as early as possible.

For that reason we again limited the use of sexed semen in the cows to the first week of breeding and switched to conventional semen in week two for all cows, regardless of their scan results.

With the heifers, we served with sexed semen to natural heats for 10 days and then gave a shot of prostaglandin (PG) to bring on the rest of the heifers, again switching to conventional semen for heifers that were served after the shot of PG.

This should give us a higher conception rate than previous years and again, if there are a few more repeats than we would like, these will be served again in week four and shouldn’t lose too much time.

The biggest change this year will be increasing the amount of beef semen used again. We had good results last year with Belgian Blue and Charolais calves early in the season.

We have used that again on the bottom 10% of the herd in the first three weeks and will use a very high percentage of Angus straws from week five onwards.

If repeats from AI are low enough, we might shorten the breeding season to 10 weeks and use all Angus straws for the last four weeks.