About this episode
The episode discusses Spring Breeding Guidelines for dairy farmers, focusing on herd management and the use of AI straws.
Kevin Downing and Dan O’Riordan of ICBF join Stuart Childs on this week’s Dairy Edge to discuss the Spring Breeding Guidelines that will be arriving to farmers across the country this week. Kevin explains how the scorecard included in the guidelines can be used to identify the herd strengths and weaknesses to allow people to see where they may need to target improvement. He then discusses the importance of using enough dairy AI straws to ensure there are adequate numbers of replacements coming through to support the needs of individual farms. 25% is required in order to ensure that 18-20% replacement rates can be maintained as not all heifers will go the distance so some surplus will be needed. He also spoke about the importance of using high DBI with high beef subindex beef sires to generate high quality dairy beef stock and emphasises the need to continue using AI until such time as there is sufficient bull power to meet demand. Finally Dan spoke about how sire advice is now available on the HerdPlus app which will facilitate more people to use it. He highlights the benefits of sire advice, balancing milk and fertility, avoiding inbreeding and lethal mutations and maximising…
People in this episode
Host: Stuart Childs
Guests: Kevin Downing, Dan O’Riordan
Topics covered
- Breeding Guidelines
- Dairy Farming
- AI Straws
- Herd Management
- Sire Advice
Keywords
- breeding guidelines
- dairy AI
- replacement rates
- sire advice
- dairy beef
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: ICBF, HerdPlus, Teagasc, LastCastMedia.com
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