Farming Talk – January 16
The other day I caught up with Dan Humphries of Dairy Insight asking him to share his insight on milk pregnancy testing.
Cows which have lost a pregnancy can be a large cost to a dairy farm. The figures are quite startling – up to 10 per cent of cows can suffer from pregnancy loss in some herds.
Clearly it will be less of a loss if that cow is identified soon enough to be re-served, and the options become very limited if a supposedly pregnant cow is dried off but never calves. If heats are spotted, then we can recheck these cows, but short of regularly scanning these cows during the pregnancy what else can we do?
Milk pregnancy testing provides an accurate and hassle-free way of checking for pregnancy. The test is measuring the levels of a protein called Pregnancy Associated Glycoprotein (PAG) and it can be performed on the samples from your normal herd milk recording. It is well worth discussing with your advisory team how milk pregnancy testing would fit in to your herd management strategy. If you’d like to find out more, please get in touch with the CIS field team on 01923 695319 or visit www.thecis.co.uk
Bernadette Crayston is the Cattle Information Service field manager for Shropshire and Midlands
