Fertility: Your Number One Trait
Fertility: Your Number One Trait
In any breeding program, improving fertility is key to keeping it profitable. How is it done, and what strategies give the best results? This article covers some of the basics.
• Measure and manage your fertility.
• Culling the empties gives immediate management benefits.
• Culling does not lift your genetics. Genetic progress in fertility comes from buying in superior fertile genetics, and it is slow.
• Watch the animals that conceive but do not wean a calf or lamb. They are the ones that slip through.
Why fertility comes first
Genetic progress in fertility is slow, so improving it is a long term goal. That should not stop you making it your number one trait. Low fertility in a breeding business is not sustainable. Agricultural enterprises have to adapt to changing markets and environments, and low fertility is like driving around with the handbrake on. It means less selection pressure to drive improvement in other traits, and fewer animals for sale to bring in revenue.
The benefit is more than having more animals to sell. Selecting replacement females shapes your future herd or flock. With a highly fertile herd you need fewer replacements and have a bigger pool of females to choose from. Fleece traits, growth, structure, yield, temperament and muscling can all be measured and selected for in the replacements. Improvement in all of those comes faster, because you can eliminate more of the undesirable animals.
Measuring what matters
The first step to managing anything is to measure it. You cannot manage what you do not measure.
The simplest measure of fertility is pregnancy testing in cattle, or scanning in sheep. It is easy to do, and no breeding herd or flock should go without it. Removing the empty and non-breeding animals has an immediate benefit, because you stop feeding animals that return nothing. For sheep, the days of knocking a reasonably priced fleece off a ewe and still making money out of her are gone.
The other simple measure is the wet or dry check. A wet cow or ewe has a calf or lamb at foot, and a dry one does not. Do the check before weaning, or at marking for sheep. After weaning every cow has a dry udder, so the check tells you nothing. Done at the right time, it confirms the pregnancy test and shows who conceived but did not rear.
Ideally, anything identified as empty goes. What you do with the rest will depend on your own circumstances, but at least keep the empties apart from breeding and lactating animals, so they do not compete for feed they will not repay.
The ones that slip through
Traditionally, when faced with difficult decisions, it is the skinny and old that go. The cows and ewes that conceived but did not wean a calf or lamb can slip through. They passed the preg test, and with nothing to feed they often look in better condition than the ones that did their job. Without a record of who reared and who did not, they stay.
For sheep, the perennial single bearers are also worth a look. For cattle, look at the cows that missed a beat in earlier years, or calve later in the season. To do this you need the records on every individual animal on tap, so you can re-sort the herd or flock on screen from the best performers to the worst. Use that to help your culling and selling decisions. Turn every difficult decision into a chance to improve your herd or flock.
Management gain versus genetic gain
Does culling the empties lift your genetics over the long term? No. The biggest effect is to make your current herd or flock as efficient as possible, and to stop animals eating feed for no return. Fertility is slow to improve genetically, and culling does not change that.
Do not let that stop you measuring and managing fertility. The management benefits are immediate and will have a big impact on your bottom line. Measuring fertility also gives you options. In a bad season, or a price spike or plunge, if you need to get rid of a few animals, you can pick the lower performers.
The recording involved is fairly basic and can be done at small expense. A software package such as KoolCollect, with a stick reader and RFID tags, is affordable and practical. Do not be fooled into thinking you need expensive drafting equipment or scales. Keep it simple to start with and build on it. You need to capture the data first, before you can justify an expensive drafter.
A note for sheep
A ewe that has reared twins is more likely than the average ewe to do it again. Keeping proven twin-bearing ewes will rebuild your flock faster than hanging onto a heap of fat single-bearing ewes.
Making genetic progress
So how do you improve fertility genetically, to make a highly fertile animal more likely? The simple answer is to buy highly fertile rams and bulls. Use seedstock and stud breeders who measure a lot of difficult traits and report fertility EBVs and ASBVs. It is not easy, but it can be done. Bringing higher fertility genetics into your own herd or flock is the best way to lift it.
Fertility also speeds up improvement in every other trait, because you have more replacements to choose from and can apply more selection. The other traits generally respond faster to selection than fertility does, so you can make good progress by culling on them. To really move ahead, use the same approach: buy in good genetics, in good rams or bulls, and eliminate the undesirable animals to improve what you have.
So start measuring individual animal performance today, to lift the production of your herd or flock. Make fertility your number one trait to improve, so it is not a handbrake on your breeding business.