Peter & Sandi Thompson

“To get a good calving, you’ve got to have a good mating. To get a good mating, you've got to have good feeding. To get good feeding, you've got to have good monitoring, and it kind of works back,” Peter says.

“Mating really becomes a focus from autumn when we start our minerals. On top of that, decisions are made at drying off. Cows are dried off on body condition score and pasture cover is monitored to ensure that we're going to meet our targets for calving. We aim for five BCS for cows and five and a half for heifers. We try and minimise weight loss between calving and mating.

“We aim for a minimum average pasture cover on 1 June of 2,100 kg DM/ha. Normally we have good growth over the winter so by calving, we’re achieving a minimum of 2300 kg DM/ha After calving, we review our calving spread and how the feed situation went.”

Instead of using tail paint for pre-mating heats, Peter relies on what he observes.

“Probably two or three weeks out from mating, I watch to see if there’s a reasonable number cycling as I’m locking them away or bringing them in. If there’s activity there, it's not a concern.

“When you're looking at tail paint after about three to four weeks, you have a flat spot where you're not as focused as you have been. So by not tail painting earlier, then I'm focused from the point of tail paint onwards, which is just under ten weeks.”

Peter says during mating you need to look at more than the heat detection aids.

“Anybody can pick something that's rubbed raw. The paint's gone. Heat detection is totally gone. It's the ones that are a little bit harder, you need to look for more. See whether they've got any marks on their back, look at the cow’s saliva and even put your hand on their back and you can feel the temperature of the cow on heat is hotter than when it's not. Observe the surrounding cows because they hang out in bulling groups. So, if you've got a cow bulling, look around that cow to see which ones are coming on soon.”

Peter says getting the cows used to you and keeping things as quiet as possible, helps him pick up what cows are on heat.

“If the cows are comfortable around you, they’ll walk through the cow shed at their own pace, in their own time. That allows you to see if something's not right. So if the one that stands in the back of the yard has come in first, you think, ‘what's wrong here?’ and look closer.”

Although the Thompson’s have a low number of cows that require treatment following a Metricheck™ test (around 3%), Peter and Sandi still see value in checking their whole herd each season.

“We’ve been metrichecking for about 10 years now,” Sandi says.

“Some of the ones that have been treated when we've done it in the early days, weren't all our at-risk cows. They weren't ones that had a hard calving, they weren't ones that had multiple births, they weren't ones with retained placentas. So, if we didn't do them all, we wouldn't be picking them up. So we don't want to drop it.”

“The day we decided to go all AB was the day we decided that we needed to have a heat detection aid,” Sandi says.

The couple currently use a combination of tail paint and heat patches or scratchies.

“We mate cows in the morning and then reapply tail paint and heat detection aids in the afternoon. We do not want to reapply too early when the cow is still showing signs of heat. It is also easier with two of us in the shed.

“We did try just using scratchies but this year we swapped to heat patches. This was a good decision as they were easier to read and more durable which is great for all AB.”

Peter and Sandi say their big focus each season is getting their replacements early and having a condensed calving spread.

“When we bought this herd, the mean calving date used to be closer to 20 days, then it got to 14 days, and I think now it's about seven days,” Peter says.

Sandi believes using SGL is the key contributor.

“I believe that's why our repro is as good as it is, years of using SGL. Because you're consistently getting those gains. They're calving earlier, they cycle earlier. It's kind of a win-win."

Peter and Sandi used to mate for six weeks using LIC’s Sire Proving Scheme KiwiCross® team to get their replacements and then finish off with short gestation. Now their bottom 15% goes to short gestation from day one.

“Then everything else goes to SGL Dairy® from week four. We want to get the most genetic gain, so we inseminate our yearlings which enables us to put a higher percent of our bottom cows to SGL. We want our empty rate to be as low as possible to give us opportunity to sell replacements too.”

Sandi says they used to have a ‘no CIDR policy’ for their whole herd. They have recently softened that approach, using CIDR® inserts for some of their animals.

“We synchro our yearlings and CIDR them for blanket insemination because they’re off-farm an hour away so it’s easier for our grazier.

“For the rest of the herd, CIDRs are done at the beginning of week five to try and reduce our empty rate. That allows the cows to have 28 days to cycle naturally, so using a CIDR at that point gives them two chances to get in-calf.

“We choose not to keep replacements from CIDR cows. Whether that's something we should or shouldn't be doing, I don't know. In saying that we're also in a position with our repro, that we can make that decision. We're fortunate that our repro results are such that we get plenty of replacements from the first four weeks which enables us to do that. If something changed, we'd have to relook at that.”

“We record everything,” Sandi says.

“All calving assistance codes and calving comments, for all calvings. So if we have any concerns, we can pull up the information and see who they are.

“We look at our submission rate in MINDA to keep an eye on how we’re tracking. As well as six week in-calf rate and not in-calf rate. We want our six-week in-calf rate to be 78% + and ideally under 10% not in-calf.”