As the seasons start to change, many of us are glad to be able to put calving behind us and to start planning ahead for the season to come. 

We are now deep into mating, with heat detection, CIDR’s, AB’s and bulls and our charts and little pocket books filled to the brim with dates and numbers. While we’re in the midst of making plans for the coming season, let’s not forget the benefits of early age pregnancy scanning, which include:

• Knowing the efficacy of your reproductive performance;

• Providing a 6 week in-calf-rate, which enables you to assess your reproductive performance based on your current mating and animal health plan. This concrete information and historical data can help you to make future decisions;

• The empty rate provides you with valuable information to drive management decisions pertaining to feed management, culling decisions, or cows that can be put back up for mating;

• Knowing calving dates enables better management decisions towards the end of the season. They are important indicators used for drying off, springer mob allocation, Body Condition Score (BCS) and feed management coming into the dry period;

• Knowing a cow’s date of insemination helps differentiate between AB and natural matings. This drives replacement decisions when calves are being selected.

With all the benefits that come with early age scanning, it is important to start planning ahead to capitalise on them and to ensure that you don’t miss out on the dates you want. 

We recommend early age scanning around 12-14 weeks after the start of mating and then 6 weeks after the last day of mating (for 2 rounds of scanning). Recommendations can change depending on mating length and should be discussed with your KeyVet when booking in your scanning.