Head Shepherd
Mark Ferguson from neXtgen Agri brings you the latest in livestock, genetics, innovation and technology. We focus on sheep and beef farming in Australia and New Zealand and the people doing great things in those industries.
Head Shepherd
Boosting Heifer Performance with Enoch Bergman’s AI Insights
Our guest this week is veterinarian Enoch Bergman. Originally from the USA, Enoch arrived in Australia in 2003. He fell in love with the people, the landscape and the agricultural innovation of Esperance, Western Australia and has been there ever since.
Enoch is passionate about improving the performance of heifers and the use of fixed-time artificial insemination (AI) in commercial breeding programmes, and shares that passion with us today. He explains the process of synchronising heifers and the positive outcomes for conception rates, calving ease, calf and heifer survival, weaning rates and rebreeding rates. He also discusses the economic analysis of integrating fixed-time AI versus natural mating, including the cost of bulls, labour and the value of pregnant heifers.
Enoch is also involved with a Producer Demonstration Sites (PDS) programme that aims to encourage the uptake of fixed-time AI. The PDS showed that using fixed-time AI reduced dystocia, calf mortality and heifer mortality. It also improved weaning weights and re-breeding success. Enoch also discusses the benefits of early and short heifer joining and the potential challenges with bull longevity.
This podcast was recorded as a video with an accompanying presentation that includes some great graphs and statistics. You can watch it at this link:
https://youtu.be/tTgjaMRu9Dg
Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited. We help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best: info@nextgenagri.com.
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Welcome to the Head Shepherd Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Ferguson, CEO here at NextGen Agri International, where we help livestock managers get the best out of their stock Before we get started. Thank you to our two fantastic sponsors for continuing to sponsor this podcast. Msd Animal Health is perhaps better known as Cooper's Animal Health in Australia and for their Allflex range across the world with a comprehensive suite of animal health and management products. Heinegger is a one-stop shop for wool harvesting and animal fiber removal. The Heinegger team have a deep understanding of livestock agriculture, backed by Swiss engineering and a family business dedicated to manufacturing the best. We are grateful to our sponsors for their support, helping us bring Head Shepherd to you each week, and now it's time to get on with this week's episode.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to Head Shepherd. This week we have Ennard Bergman on the show, who is entertaining and very educational, so I'm sure you're going to enjoy that. Before we get underway, we've released another couple of articles over the last couple of weeks, so I just wanted to bring your attention to that. Firstly, Sophie, you've written about when to wean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so weaning for me is one of my favourite topics, and sheep, I think, are a mix of artificially rearing sheep and trying to get them off milk powder as fast as possible and also, if one can have a favorite sheep graph, my favorite sheep graph is the one which looks at pasture intake versus milk intake of a lamb over the first sort of 16 weeks, and that is probably one of the graphs that got me hooked into data and science and just, yeah, it really shows that when you wean lambs has quite an impact on various things, I guess, and be it your cost of production or be it the future performance of the animals, be it the lambs or the ewes. Yeah, I thought I'd like write a little article, seeing as people are probably thinking about when they should be weaning and, yeah, hopefully give you some insights so you can make that decision yourself a bit more educatedly.
Speaker 1:Excellent, fantastic. So yeah, and I've also written an article which has just gone out over just before the weekend, and that was on bending the growth curve. So looking at, I guess, that whole question which is always out there in both cattle and sheep mature weight of either cows or ewes Obviously we want early growth in most systems, but we don't want those sheep to get too, or sheep and cattle to get too big. So I've talked about sort of yeah, I guess what we know about that so far and why it's important to keep selecting sheep and cattle down that road. Right, we'll get underway with this week's show. Enoch Bergman is. We've also got a YouTube video on this episode. So if you want to sort of watch along, then jump on. He's got a slideshow that we delivered as we went through this interview, so you might actually get more value out of watching on YouTube than listening in the vehicle. It's worth listening to as well, but you'll definitely get a little bit more if you watch the slides at the same time.
Speaker 1:Uh, he's a. He's a really great fellow to chat with and I think you're really going to enjoy. Enjoy this show. It's around artificial insemination of heifers. So fixed ai in heifers and the economics around that. He's done a lot of work on that. He's also uh, you can chase his youtube channel as well. He's uh, he's got heaps of viewers on there, if you like, seeing abscesses popped and that sort of crazy stuff which most people do, unfortunately, for whatever weird reason. Um, he's got some pretty, uh cool vet stuff going on as well. I think over 100 000 subscribers. So, um, yeah, he's certainly certainly a bit of a star on youtube as well. So you might you'll stumble across him if you jump on our YouTube channel as well. But, yeah, we'll get underway with this week's show.
Speaker 2:Hi guys, sophie here, just a little note from editing. The first five minutes of the podcast have some audio disturbance in it, which I've tried to fix, and this is the best I could do. But yeah, after the five-minute mark it disappears completely and it's just your normal podcast. But yeah, bear with us for the first five minutes and we'll be away.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Head Shepherd Anup Bergman hey.
Speaker 3:Mark, how are you going?
Speaker 1:Good mate, awesome to have you along and thanks very much for your time. I've been watching your work for lots of years now and you had your PDS around fixed-time, ai and heifers and sort of a lot of work on the economics of that. So that's going to be what we want to talk about today, but we might just start off how you ended up living the dream in Esperance.
Speaker 3:Man, I am living the dream. So yeah, I grew up in a little town of nobody out in eastern Colorado, full of lovely people, but there just weren't many of them called Wild Horse. It was 12 people growing up it's now down to five and I went to uni. To try to be able to come back and help my friends and family was the plan? Got into vet school, finished vet school and in the process realized that there was a much bigger world out there, kind of went home and ag had kind of slipped more towards total crop, so a decline of running cattle out that way. So I thought, heck, I'll just go check out Australia for a year and then I'll come back and figure out where I want to live and set my resume over.
Speaker 3:And a good fellow down here, david Swan at Swan's Vets, got a hold of my resume and said hey, come, throw your hat in the ring. So I applied for the job and he hired me and I flew straight here. That was back in 03, mark, and after a year or two I was going to either go to South America or head north, because that's what I thought I was getting into. I was a bit surprised down here with all this green grass yeah it blew my mind really and I said to Swanee I think I'm going to head off, he said would you love me to stick around?
Speaker 3:I said, well, look, I've never intended to work for somebody my whole life. If you let me buy into the business here, I'll stay here until I'm dead. So he said, rightio, and I bought into the business.
Speaker 2:And yeah and the reason I've stayed is Esperance is magic.
Speaker 3:These beautiful beaches, some of the best in the world, so much to do, but the reason I really stay is because of the people and the animals that they look after.
Speaker 3:So it's just. I've got new friends and family. The farmers down here are just so keen to adopt innovation. Like, we're one of the last places in Australia to be given out with conditional purchase. I think the last block here was released in 87, remarkably. I mean, that just blows the mind, doesn't it? Yeah, so it's a real. A lot of these guys were doing it tough in South Australia and hopped in their 9Gs and came across the Dusty Nullarburn and set up down here and we're able to, you know, create a life for themselves and their future progeny, and so the town's really humming and these guys just love innovation. Yeah, that's me in a nutshell.
Speaker 1:Excellent, so obviously well vet trained. And then through that.
Speaker 3:Yep went to Colorado State University. Yep Did a food and medicine internship. A little bit of extra post-doctorate work, mark.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right on, excellent. And then obviously getting into AI is a natural progression. But yeah, I guess, maybe talk us through maybe the precursor to the PDS and then the PDS itself.
Speaker 3:Well, when I first arrived in Esperance, a lot of my producers when I would go preg testing for them we would find that their heifer pregnancy rates were excellent, their cow pregnancy rates were acceptable. But their first calver rates were pretty low. And when I started querying them about what they were doing the practice at the time mostly for most of my clients what I got here was they would join their heifers for the same period of time that they joined their cows. I said, look, put the bull out the first of June. And we put them in, for some guys even up to three months, quite a few producers actually. And so I kind of started exploring that with these guys and they would say, wow, you know, heifers, they do a poor job, they produce crappy little calves and they struggle to get back in calf. And I said, well, it's not really the heifer's fault. You've kind of set them up to fail a little bit in that. You've got to realize that heifers require more time after they calve to prepare their uterus for that next pregnancy. So why don't you try joining those heifers a little bit earlier and a little bit shorter? So I started getting a bit of success in that because guys would see the pull through of you know, the calves.
Speaker 3:Heifers calved in a tighter window. They're a little bit earlier. Heifers don't produce as much milk, so the calves fit in a little bit better If they prime the system where they only expected to get about 80% of them pregnant. Those other 20% could be sold before they cut more teeth. So they're reasonably valuable animals. And then those heifers had exceptional conception rates the following year. So then, to try to push that a little bit further, we started sinking them with two shots of prostaglandin at the front end, and it would be two or three weeks ahead of the cow mob. We could, uh, we could, run them at five percent bulls with two shots of prostaglandin, and then we could pull some bulls back below into the cows and we could get some pretty nice conception rates in a four week or a seven week mating with that methodology.
Speaker 3:So then we got, and then we had guys having cabin trouble here and there. So then we thought, well, heck, if we're going to synchronize them, why don't we capitalize on that synchrony? So I started implementing or integrating fixed time AI in these heifer mating programs and, man, it was just started to kick ass, like once people did it and they had that super tight calving.
Speaker 3:You know, those first 21 days that when a heifer would cycle, instead condensed over a single day and they just get this big slug of calves. And then the caveat to that is we, we, you know we went out there and that's when the curve benders were just starting to come about and first bull we used was bull, called final answer, who they eventually cloned. He was such a cool bull and so he was like negative eight on gl. So he's about eight days early and he was low birth weight and high weaning weight. So we could, we could, we could have our cake and eat it too. You get these calves on the ground a little bit early. Or again, we can get them nice and small when they hit the ground, because they're kicked out of bed early and then they would grow like steam and uh and produce a wiener. That um, that in many cases, because of the fact that we joined a little bit early, because of the fact that shorter gl and because of those ebvs for growth, those calves were actually better than the calves out of their cows and that really started to open people's eyes.
Speaker 3:Because the man, the mantra of many of my producers was you don't keep heifers out of your heifers, you know they just do a poor job. I'm like, well, who's your best genetics? And if it isn't your heifers, you're going backwards. And but what we're doing is we're terminally crossing our heifers to poor genetics. And then that those progeny which we were outing we were getting discounted because that you know they were. They were smaller because we're using really safe, low weaning white bulls. Who, who often was the caveat to you know the prerequisite to have low birth weight before curb benders became available, mostly driven by gestational length.
Speaker 3:So we just really turned everything on their head and said let's keep heifers out of our heifers, which is awesome because then it frees us up to to terminally cross some of our older cows, you know, some of those older girls with older genetics. We can terminally cross those for profit, profit, whether we bring in a euro or something like that. So it just creates all this great flexibility within the system and um. So we're kicking butt, doing stuff. And then mla came up with their producer demonstration sites as a program, which I just love. It's just a great way for um producer groups to get one, get a little bit of a bit of a profile like our group, a sheep and beef, you know. It's been really good for our group and and also to find something that you're doing well and to help disseminate that information to a wider audience, and so it's just been a dream run. So I'd love to tell you about that PDS Mark, which I reckon is why you called.
Speaker 1:You're on to it, my friend. Yeah, that's exactly what I want to hear about.
Speaker 3:Got any questions for my little wind-up?
Speaker 1:No, no, that's awesome and yeah, and I think we're looking here forward to hearing the spiel on the PDS and we'll ask questions as we go. But, yeah, if you want to launch into it, and for those listening, we are recording the visuals as well, so they'll be somewhere on YouTube. You better find this as well if you want to actually watch, but if not, just listen along and we'll make sure we make it a good Audible experience as well.
Speaker 3:Hey, mark, about three or four months ago I got a button off YouTube, so I've got a YouTube channel called Enoch the Wanker. I mean sorry, enoch the Cow Vet, excellent, so we'll load on your channel. I hit my 100,000 subscribers, so that's pretty cool, all Excellent, so we'll load on your channel.
Speaker 1:I hit my 100,000 subscribers so that's pretty cool, all right.
Speaker 3:Let's get rocking how many subscribers 100,000. I got 122, I think oh yeah, 122,000. Yeah, but they give you a button when you hit 100,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, we're well off the button.
Speaker 3:They're on the screen. Let me walk you through this pds, so producer demonstration sites bloody brilliant. So every time an animal goes to the kill floor, you know five dollars goes into a bucket and that bucket gets disseminated out for the benefit of all of us that produce protein. Um, and I just think the pds program was a great one, really good one. It helped. I think it helped kickstart a lot of producer groups because, as I say when I give these talks, you know, use your local producer group if you've got something you love doing that you think will help other farmers. But if you, if you don't have a producer group, bloody bank, make one um. So essentially, um for this pds um, the producers that were involved had to be people that hadn't previously ai. So what we did is I had probably about half the district ai in their efforts, but I had a few guys and some of the guys were pretty big guys that were like, ah, I don't really see the value, oh, it looks expensive. You know, they had all sorts of reasons why they didn't want to do a lot of work, a lot of effort.
Speaker 3:And so when, when we, when we successfully applied for the PDS, we approached some of those farmers and I was like, hey, look, you know, give it a crack. So it was real simple, like, what we wanted is no bias or minimum bias. So we just enrolled heifers. So we essentially hijacked heifers. So these guys, to give you the story, so the PDS application process by the time we got it done, it was right on the point of the bulls getting ready to go out. And so we hit up these farmers and said, right, you've already got your bulls to put over your heifers. Uh-huh, hey, how about this? Let's hijack half those heifers.
Speaker 3:So what we did is based on the last digit of the ear tag odds and evens. We took half the heifers out and then they got synchronized and they got AI'd on the same day that the bulls that they already had organized, that they'd already purchased for the job, so there's no bias there went out with the other heifers and and then we managed them, um, identically and just measured stuff, which is pretty cool. So, um, yeah, there are 15 sites and there's around two and a half thousand heifers enrolled in the study, so it's got a reasonable degree of power. Um, so that's our producer group there, a sheep and beef.
Speaker 3:Um, it was called a sheep at the time, but with all the good beef stuff we've been doing, we've added the cattle side to it. Um, that's my practice, one One's veterinary services that I'm a partner in, and then meat and livestock Australia. We've got a bit of a hand from Veta-Keynal and ABS and Richard White for performance genetics as far as subsidizing some of the products, and in the economic analysis we went back and removed all those subsidies.
Speaker 2:So it was what it would have cost the producer full-time. So what was our goal?
Speaker 3:Our goal is to encourage the uptake of fixed-time AI in commercial life-formating programs. Obviously, if more producers integrate fixed-time AI, the greater population of cattle in Australia has access to potentially superior genetics and we can all move forward collectively. We needed to estimate the cost of integrating fixed-time AI versus natural mating. So try to develop, you know, a bit of modeling there on. And how do we do that? Well, we'd have to capture some fixed time AI costs and we'd have to come up with some bull costs and then try to capture the differences in these outcomes that we get from these two different interventions and then estimate that value. So what are we looking at? Well, we're going to target conception rate, dystocia rate, so calving trouble, calf and heifer mortality, weaning rates and rebreeding rates, and then we'd pull up there I mean but we'll talk about some stuff later by a guy named Cushman, and what we know is that heifers that are set up to succeed to calve early as heifers and then calve again early again the next year. That will carry on for years six, even six, seven, eight years later. And then, out of all that information, let's see if we could develop a return on investment of integrating fixed time AI into commercial life or mating programs and I'm not trying to get guys to not buy bulls, I'm just trying to get them to integrate fixed time AI into commercial life or mating programs. So for most of my producers they're still buying bulls and they're back in their AI. They're just probably reducing their bull requirements over their heifers by about a third.
Speaker 3:One of the things MLA wanted, jeff Neith said look, I'd love to see just to reinforce the importance of critical mating weight. So looking at this is just a quick slide on the conception rates. We got based on weights. So producers had their heifers enrolled and admittedly, sometimes the heifers were quite light and sometimes they're quite heavy and what we saw is what we've seen in the lit. We already kind of knew that when given about two thirds of mature cow weight, we can expect a pretty similar outcome. So once the if they're under 300 kilos, we saw a reduction in conception rate. Interestingly, but it was pretty small numbers.
Speaker 3:Um, if they're really really, really big, we had poor conception rates as poor conception rates as well, and I think that could be have something to do with there's some cool stuff by getting cliff lamb, where if heifers are allowed to get exceptionally fat, they have a memory of that, of that obesity, and it's really hard to get them to cycle. It's kind of like if you're driving, if you're driving down the road doing about a you know 110 and come up behind a caravan, it's pretty easy to get around it, to get on a rising plane of speed, but if you're, if you're doing 160 and you come up behind some other bogan doing similar, a similar speed, it's pretty hard to get around them. And I think sometimes those big fat heifers I think in my experience with ai, really well grown out, incredibly obese heifers are often hard to um, to get, to achieve good reproductive outcomes on it. I think there's a little bit of a lesson there and the stats seem to show it so that's a pretty solid heifer over 425 kilos.
Speaker 3:Oh man, yeah, those are some big girls. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah, a bit of rosy um, anyhow. So, so, um, the um, abs provided us a few cool bulls, so these are some pretty, uh, pretty well-known older bulls. Landfall a couple of bulls there, keystone, widely used around Australia. Uh, broken bow um murder, do kicking. Uh command, widely used um in the U? S and here. And then, uh, richard White, um hooked us up with Aerieville general looking at breed plan figures.
Speaker 3:We got a few of our producers because we just wanted to kind of map out and just highlight the differences in the opportunities when you go and buy AI, and this is one of the arguments I had with not an argument, but some of the discussion around some of the stuff on Beef Central was people would say, oh well, why can't people just go buy these bulls that you're using for AI? Well, you can try, but these are elite bulls, these are your unicorns, you know, on the, the crazy hot scale, um. So the, the um, these are some different producers, um, and these are the bulls that they purchased. So there's all their ebvs um across there. And then here's the ai sires that we used in 2017 general leonardo broken bow.
Speaker 3:If we look, at that as a graph and that's a bit messy and kind of hard to kind of see what we're looking at. But there's's the three different farms and then there's the AI side, which is the average of their EBVs. But let's look at the things that we're concerned with in the context of the PDS. So, as far as calving ease and what I try to strategize to do when I AI for my local producers is I'm trying to buy extreme calving ease bulls so I'm synchronizing these heifers for the benefit of synchrony. That's my main drive. I'm trying to get more of these girls in calf early so they can early again the next year and go on to have an excellent reproductive life. But I'm also trying to mitigate dystocia and there's the maternal side of that contribution to that equation and then there's the bull side. So if I can chase bulls that are extreme in regard to their calving these EBVs, hopefully I can moderate some of the female genetics which might contribute to dystocia. So, as you can see, I mean these guys did a good job with their calving ease direct calving ease daughters, gestation length and birth weight when they when they bought these bulls.
Speaker 3:But we can do better with AI and I think that's that's the, that's the real key. You can go to a bull sale but only one guy can buy the top bull we also selected for growth. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to get cavities, but we're also trying to get animals that will continue to grow well and the sort of bulls that I love myself are low birth weight, high 200, high 400, maybe cool off at 600 days and then have a moderate mature cow weight. You can see that in kind of the percentile rankings here of the bulls that we selected for the PDS, because I don't I'm not a big fan of monster cows, because monster cows have monster requirements, monster appetites.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's it. That's it. Got big bellies Get in my belly and then, okay, so we needed to crunch some numbers, all right. Oh well, and this is a question I used to ask a lot of farmers hey, what's your bull cost? And they go, oh, he cost me six grand. I say, yeah, but what is your bull cost? They say, well, I told you it was six grand. I say yeah, but what's it cost per calf? And I used to run these numbers with producers just shooting the breeze. So I went on to Beef Central. John Condon quoted, in the year of the study, 2017, that the average bull price angus bull was 7 634 bucks. So what I say to my farmers is you got to say to yourself their bull mating cost is actually your purchase price, your bull minus the cold value divided by his expected longevity. And phil holmes did some stuff um with a number of his producers um showing an angus average 2.7 um joinings before they broke down or were cold for whatever reason.
Speaker 2:So we went with three.
Speaker 3:And I want to quickly point out that in this study, anytime we were given an opportunity to put in an estimate, we always erred on the side of caution. We always, if anything, tried to buy us away from the outcome that we're trying to prove. So the cold value of two grand, that's a pretty good return for a bull. And a reasonable number of bulls don't even make the truck because they're ncv, you know, blown stifle, can't, can't walk or, uh, or horrific penile injury and, um, you know, unable to it has to be euthanized on welfare grounds. But so if we look at that, the annual bull annual purchase cost works out to 1878 per year. Is the purchase cost distributed over. But bulls eat stuff and stuff, and so we can't discount that. So what's that worth? Well, a bull eats about as much as a cow and a half, and so then we went to the pregnancy rate over the natural mates in the trial of 82%, and we went. That time was about $4 per kilo for weaned calves, and then we went with a conservative weaning weight average for the district of $300. And that told us that the bull was displacing a potential return for the producer of $1,476.
Speaker 3:Now we add those two numbers together and we get an estimated bull total annual cost of $3,354. Pretty straightforward. Then we take that and multiply it, times 3% and that gives us a cost per heifer mated of about a hundred bucks. So there you go. I mean you could argue and say it's $80. You could argue and say it's $120. But that's kind of an interesting thing that I think a lot of farmers haven't actually thought about. They know they've got a bull that they paid for and they know you're going to sell them later, but what did it cost per heifer mated? So in our trial we came up with $100.
Speaker 1:There's In terms of their bull buying. So they're averaging 13, 14 grand for bulls. So it becomes quite a heavy per ever mating number.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and especially if you go back to some of the stones that were thrown at the PDS and they said, oh, why don't you just go buy a bull like that? Well, the bulls that we used in the AI program were $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 bulls. As far as on the and if and if we would have known the like, for instance, you know baldridge command if they'd have known the, the semen sales that that bull would have produced, eventually she would have been well into the hundreds of thousands. Okay, so then? So, in order to calculate, um, the uh, the cost of reasonable or integratingtime AI, one of the key pieces of information we need is pregnancy rate. So these are all the properties over the duration of the trial. So you get your fixed-time AI integrated versus your syndicate-mated. Again, the ones that were AI integrated got AI'd and 10 days later joined the same bulls that the syndicate-mated bulls were joined to. So they went back together with their siblings 10 days later and stayed together as a group.
Speaker 3:So if we crunch all those numbers, the difference between properties varied from 21.9% improvement in conception rate or 21.9% relative improvement in conception rate down to a negative six and a half percent. On average, the average site had a 3.1% better pregnancy rate in the fixed time I integrated. But when we crunched all the numbers and combined all the numbers together, mark, we came up with a 0.8% difference and so 4.6% reduction in the number of empties. So now I had what I needed to try to partially what I needed to start calculating the difference between integrating fixed time AI or syndicate meeting. So what we did is we said, right, let's look in the first year, because we don't do this every year, because again, we're just trying to get an estimate. Let's look in the first year because we don't want to do this every year, because again, we're just trying to get an estimate. We said, right, let's look in the first year, let's interrogate the data set and let's ask ourselves, what if farm A had integrated AI? What if farm A had only used bulls?
Speaker 3:So if we look at farm A there, if they would have integrated fixed-time AI, their conception rate in their trial was 83.8% and their bull requirement at 2%, because if you're integrating fixed-time AI, you can back them up at 2% rather than at 3%. They would need eight bulls, and so their total annual bull costs, going back to our mathematics that we calculated on the previous slide, comes out to $26,832. And so the bull cost per head mated would be $68.62. So we've saved a little bit by reducing the bull numbers by a third. Our AI cost per head mated and this is true cost this was travel, this was the semen, this was the synchronization drugs, this is the whole box and dice without any subsidies. And if you looked at some of the stuff that, um, that was on beef central recently, it was mad like even just the cost of ai was like 120 bucks.
Speaker 3:I cannot work out where they got their numbers from they're just exorbitant like it's insane, like a who would ai I mean you read that hell, I'm not gonna. It's cost six hundred dollars to ai account.
Speaker 3:It doesn't this is literally what it costs this guy for me to jump in my? U in the morning, go around to the smoko shop, get myself a savory mints, a bucket full of iced coffees because that's what I do with my youtube winnings drive out to the property, hop out, say how you going the ladies are on heat. We ai'd while we listened to Metallica through my speaker and we AI'd 391 cows and then I high-fived the guys and I drove home. It was $53 per head total cost. So then, if we do that on the fixed-time integrated mating cost per heifer mated so that's adding the bull cost to the AI cost that comes out to $122. And then if we divide that by the pregnancy rate so divided by 0.83, that gives us a fixed-time AI integrated mating cost per pregnancy of $145.61. Cool. Now the cost difference here will make sense in a minute, and that's on this next picture.
Speaker 3:So if we look down here, if the same producer would have said right, I'm not going to AI bugger, it's too expensive, it's too much of a pain in the ass. Well, with the girls of his that were syndicate mated, we got an 81.2% conception rate. But he would have required 12 bulls. So that would have worked out to about 40 grand in annual bull costs for a total mating cost of $102. The AI cost would have been zero, so the combined cost would have been $102.94. Syndicate mating cost so dividing that number by 0.81, gives us $126 per pregnancy. That gives us an $18 difference. So for that particular producer, it cost him an additional $18 to integrate fixed-time AI and I guess our goal is to help him regain that through better performance.
Speaker 3:And if you were to say no, no, I don't believe in the 2% thing. Well, that's okay. If that's the way you feel, we can go ahead and put. If you look at 68 minus 102, that's another $32, $34, you could just add $34 to that. 1884, which would give you $52, was the cost difference if you wanted to run the same number of bulls. Okay, Now, fixed time AI doesn't work for everybody in the economics in this context, and so farm B is a classic.
Speaker 3:So farm B only had 38 heifers. So at 2% he's going to need one bull and at 3% he's going to need one bull. So he didn't save anything on his bulls, and I guess that's kind of what I was referring to with the last fellow. And because he's a small guy, the cost of travel to get out to his place is a bit higher. You know those fixed costs $64.87 per head because he had smaller numbers, and so it came out for a total integrated cost for him of $153.13. Now I will kind of just chuck in here for a minute, Mark, that guys like him that only have about 30 or 40 heifers. Often what I get these guys doing is I say, look, how about this? Keep all your heifers and then just sell the really ugly ones, the really ugly ones, the snaggletooths, the ones with horns, the ones that just try to eat you, and then just do one round of AI and that's it.
Speaker 3:And I've got a reasonable number of producers doing that. They just do one round of AI bang and then we practice. It freaks out. Everything that's empty goes into a grassy contract. Or because we've got more long feeding going on in WA we got feedlotters chasing 400 kilo calves, heifers. They've got an outlet for those animals and then that would take his bull cost. His total mating cost will be $64.87. And then all of a sudden he would be $20 in front on that cost difference rather than $60 behind. So a little bit of a quick caveat there, but you can kind of see the point of what we're doing as far as this cost difference. So when we took all these different properties and looked at their bull requirements with or without integrating fixed time AI and then calculated their true cost on their AI program in the end here's what we showed Was that the average producer in that first year spent an additional $23 on the value of that calf to put another calf on the ground. It's pretty cool. So I was looking for a cool analogy.
Speaker 3:So I was like all right, baseball, I love baseball, I love cows, I love cows and baseball. So luckily I was able to find this, which is pretty cool. I was giving a talk in South Australia one time. Down south of Adelaide, at Hondorf, there was an old golf course 18 holes that had shut down and someone was grazing it. I was thinking, man, how cool would that be to have an 18-hole golf course rotationally grazed, where every day you go out there, there's a different hole that has the cow buys.
Speaker 3:If you drop it in a lump of cow pat, you get to do a drop ball washers everywhere. Um, how rad would that be. Yeah, love to see grass being used to feed the planet, and, uh, and also this grass. If we, uh, if we were to mow that and then put it into a uh, into a mulcher, it's going to produce a shitload of methane. So instead, what I want to do is I want to take that grass and feed it to a cow so we can produce a bit of protein and we can spill a little bit of methane, which 12 years later will degrade back into carbon dioxide, and that's far better for the planet than to allow that grass to just fall on the ground nicely.
Speaker 1:Nicely added that in there, man, that's good.
Speaker 3:Well, I gotta tell the truth. It's pretty obvious who's who's incredibly organized? Yeah, yeah. Who's destroying our planet? Yeah, yeah. Who's got the money in their pockets? Yeah, yeah, those other guys sequestered carbon. Let's put it in the atmosphere. Cows, let's recycle carbon. Who do you think's killing the planet? We're the recyclers, bloody hell, it's just madness mark.
Speaker 1:It's bloody madness. It's insane. Okay. So here we are.
Speaker 3:We're behind by 23 bucks natural mated versus fixed mai all right, ding, ding, ding, ding ding ding ding, ding.
Speaker 3:All right, now we've got labor costs right. So you know you can't like not include that, otherwise you know it's a bit of a furphy. Now, interesting, this is a cool story. So one of the biggest producers that we had, the owner was a good friend of mine. Simon's like nah, nah, I don't know if I want to do this. And I was like, well you're, he was the president, he was the, the committee, the cattle committee president's like well, you got it because you know you're the cattle. So he goes, all right, so we'll do it. His, his workers loved it.
Speaker 3:Calving was a dream because they calved a nice tight window. The next year we're putting the devices in simon's out there helping put him in. I said, hey, simon, what he goes. Oh, it's a lot of work. And all the workers who were running cattle up the race, they attacked him. They said, oh, fuck off, you're not out here pulling calves, you prick. So it's the difference between scheduled labor and unscheduled labor. And when it comes to calving season, unscheduled, you know which one's obviously more advantageous.
Speaker 3:So, estimating producer costs. We've got a bunch of farmers in the room said righty, oh, how long. We surveyed them all. You know guys that were in the pdsa. So let's, let's work out what it costs you. So it's estimated. The guys. We came to a conclusion collectively that it takes about 40 man hours, including mustering, per 100 cows enrolled in fixed time ai. So you get 100 cows. Takes about 40 man hours to put the devices in, pull the devices, give prostate um and stand around while I'm ailing. I said their time's worth about. They said 30 bucks an hour. So he said, all right, twelve hundred dollars per hundred a um, a I'd works out to twelve dollars per hundred at a I'd. We divided that by the fixed time ai pregnancy rate of 82.7 came up with 14 and a half dollars per pregnancy additional.
Speaker 3:So we're falling in the hole. We're behind. It's a bit like uh, I don't. Did you watch the? Did you watch the soccer roos the other day with? Oh man, they were. They're getting their ass handed to him by Zambia. Oh man, they just pulled their socks up for four unanswered goals. It was awesome. I didn't say that, all right. So so if we go back to this slide now, we can look at some economics. So again, here's a difference 0.8%. So guys in the room as well said all right, guys, we need to work out what's the value of a pregnant heifer versus an empty heifer. Now here's an important part of Mr Enoch and the way I view the world.
Speaker 2:I don't want to get all the heifers pregnant.
Speaker 3:I got a friend of mine he was a neighbor growing up Kitrow he came and uh interviewed I don't know if you've run into kit um, but he um he's one of the top uh seed stock producers in the us now um raising composites and um, he was just, he was just getting going, but he's had a lot of success since and he came and spoke at my vet school one time and he asked the vet students he said guys, we're all there, what, um, what's better in your heifers, 95 pregnant or pregnant or 85%? The crowd's like this guy's an idiot, he goes 95%.
Speaker 2:I was like 85, kid, he goes 80?
Speaker 3:Is that you, hey man, don't mess up my story and he's right If you get all your heifers pregnant.
Speaker 3:You've given them too much, you've looked after them too well. You want that first heifer mating to be a hoop, a selection criteria. You want to improve your herd and getting them all pregnant doesn't put any selection pressure on them. So I've really pushed my producers to join more heifers, join them short and and value add that empty animal. So I've really pushed them to not over emphasize the value of that pregnant heifer, because it used to be. They used to join him for 12 weeks, really wanted to get them all pregnant and feeling really good about themselves. And the next, next year they were empty, a lot of them, 20% of them and they had already cut teeth. So they had four teeth now and now they've got a much decreased value proposition and they've produced the last calf born. So it's this tiny little calf and I was like this is a false economy, guys. We don't want these heifers to get pregnant, so we came up with $100. These heifers get pregnant, so we came up with a hundred dollars, which, so we said that's 80 cents difference. So that puts us on the board of the buck.
Speaker 3:Now some people might say, oh, pregnant heifer, well, it's worth a lot of money to me. Well, hell, put that number on the left up more than if you want to, but we we put it down at low rate. Um, so then we looked at dystocia and so it's just calving trouble. And um, yeah, some guys like far out that farm d had almost a third of their of their naturally mated heifers had calving trouble. It was huge. But when we looked at all the stats across the board for all the different properties, the average property had twice as much dystocia in the natural mates versus the ones that were AI'd and joined with the same bulls.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the dystocia within the integrated fixed-time AI group were still from the same bulls that were in the syndicate mate but were able to cut it in half. Because if you look in the integrated fixed-time AI group.
Speaker 3:About 70% of the calves were born from AI, because the conception rate goes around 60% to AI. And the 10% are gone, the empties. So the majority of the calves are born from fixed-time AI.
Speaker 3:So yeah that's a 5.1% reduction. When you so that's a 5.1% reduction. When we combined the whole data set, what we found is larger producers, I think, had more flexibility to buy appropriate bulls to manage dystocia. So in the larger properties the dystocia effect wasn't as extreme. So when we combined the data set it was 1.6% reduction in dystocia or 21.9% reduction. So we go with that number rather than the big number and we said right, what's that cost? And we said what's it cost to get the cow into the yard, bring her up, bring her to the yard, put a hand in, get the calf delivered, manage the cow and calf, put her back in the paddock. So I said, oh well, what if?
Speaker 3:the heifer does, it doesn't matter. What if the calf does, doesn't matter, it's just the intervention. What does intervention cost you? And sometimes you got to call me and so the team came up with well, it's about a $200 event. So we said, all right, 1.6%, that's $3. All right.
Speaker 2:So there we go, we're up four bucks, cool.
Speaker 3:Then we looked at calf mortality and calf mortality was pretty interesting, right. So on the average farm it was a two-third, 60 percent, um, um, a higher rate of uh sorry, we were able to reduce 60 percent of the mortalities, so it went from 2.6.7 percent and then actually made it down to 2.7 percent in the syndicate. So we're able to almost reduce by two-thirds the amount of um of calf mortality in the combined data set. Again, similar to my previous comments, we were able to pretty much have it. So half as many dead calves. So that's pretty cool 2.7%.
Speaker 1:So we said well, what's that worth?
Speaker 3:So we said rightio, let's say that, a little calf on the ground, with this whole future in front of it, you know, eventually he's going to be worth, you know, $1,600. But what's he worth now? Let's say $500. And it depends on whether you're out your empties at calf marking, which I encourage people to do. You know, wet, dry, get rid of your girls that lost their calf or failed to calf. And so we came up with $500. We said, right, that's worth $1,350. And these are the kind of bulls we're trying to raise. This was a first calf born out of Pimp, who's a local producer 17 days early, 32 kilos grows like steam.
Speaker 2:So if we plug those numbers in that, we're 18 bucks, we're getting closer.
Speaker 3:All right. Heifer mortality there wasn't much of it. So as far as statistical significance, you know we can show numerical stuff, but statistically there just wasn't. The data set's not large enough to have statistical significance on that. But here's what's so rad Like, we were able to reduce mortality by you know, 95% in the AI versus syndicate-mated, according to the data set. But again, it's numerical, not statistical. And then when we looked at the combined data set, we reduced the heifer mortality by 75% for a total mortality reduction of 1% real.
Speaker 1:So we said well, what's a?
Speaker 3:heifer worth A preg tested in-calf heifer. On the point of calving so she's got a cow, she's getting ready to calve, versus now she's deceased and we said, well, that's worth $2,000. So I said that's $19. So, hey, we broke even Winner winner chicken dinner. So the cost of integrating fixed-time AI, it's even money and you've got genetic improvement which we haven't even factored in, but there's more.
Speaker 1:There's more Mark, there's more.
Speaker 3:Give it to me, man, that'd be great. I'll give it to you, brother, we would see, because most guys were unable to pair up, you know, calves with mothers, but luckily we had a few farms that could and it was consistent. And it's not surprising that it was consistent. So here's the the weaning weights of the fixed time, ai integrated, versus the syndicate mated and there's the average.
Speaker 3:So if we look at it, numerically, um, we and that that the girls that were integrated had ai integrated versus the syndicate made it. On average, those calves are 15 kilos heavier at weaning, and this makes sense for a number of reasons, right? So what are those reasons? Well, here's one is you know, our 200 and 400 day weights are superior. So I mean these genetics. You know EBVs are based on good science and so these animals are genetically superior. They've also got some environmental influences, such as gestational length, so they're able to get hit the ground early with a reasonable amount of size to them and keep growing. And then also synchrony. So here is one of my this is just my favorite slide on the whole thing. So this is pretty rad. So the blue is the calving distribution from the fixed MIA integrated calves and the orange is the syndicate mated.
Speaker 3:So the fixed MIA integrated on average calved eight days early and you can see the nice bell curve distribution there. So we took those first 21 days that they would have cycled and we said, all right, you're all pregnant on day zero. And so you know, 279 days later. There you go. Now the syndicate mated. They've got the similar distribution but they've got a 21-day plateau in the middle. So you can see that comes up, then you get flat for about 20 days or so and then it's down again. And you can also see on the AI integrated, see the first hump and then at 21 days later you can see the second hump and then at 42 days later you can kind of imagine a third hump which is what you'd expect.
Speaker 3:It's pretty rad and that's why, with my guys in Esperance, I say, right, let's AI, let's wait 10 days, let's put the bull in for either four weeks or seven weeks. So what we're trying to do is not pull the bull out right in the middle of a re-sync. So the bulls, on average, calved on day 10.8. The AI integrated animals calved on average on day 2.7. So that's the entire distribution of all the calves ai'd and backed up by bulls. Okay, calved on day 2.7 of the of the of the calving season, for an improvement of eight days. So that's super rad. And so that eight days equals probably eight kilos. And so this is some stuff.
Speaker 3:Cliff lamb pulled together and did the stats for me and it was highly significant. You know the difference in them. Uh, relative calving date. So so 2.65 versus 10.84. Super cool, and that's the whole driver.
Speaker 3:That's my whole career as a cattle vet to try to get heifers to calve as early as possible without calving trouble, so that they can go on to be a good cow and do good things. So the weaning weight difference we said, right, $4 per kilo. So that's another $60. So, man, that just puts us way in front. And then again, this is my big driver, this is what I'm trying to do. So this is a survival curve on.
Speaker 3:You know, when all the calves are born, 100% all the way to the right, 0% on the left, and day zero is Dr Google's calving date 283 days, you know, post conception.
Speaker 3:And so, in the AI integrated, 63.8% of the calves are already on the ground. That is kick ass. And we know that cows take about 55 days to start cycling and, according to the lit heifer stake, 20 to 30 days longer. So heifers, conceivably everything to the left of that line is cycling when the bull goes in, everything to the right of that line is going to start cycling at some point whilst they're in with the bulls, and that's going to put those animals on the right side of that line at a disadvantage. So what we're trying to do is get more of these heifers on the left-hand side of that line so that when the bulls go in, they're going give it to me one more time, and so that's so that they can go on to continue to do what we need them to do, which is to raise high quality protein to feed the world, because no one does a better job than we do no one especially not soybeans.
Speaker 3:So that's the rebreeding success. This came out in spades. It's super cool, like, look at these stats, there's a couple of farms there that was inverted. But man, it's just super rad, have a looky-loo. So on, on average, we had a four and a half percent better conception rate real time to the ones that were ai integrated versus naturally mated. So you know, we had a 90.4 percent conception rate in the ai integrated ones versus an 85.8 percent in the syndicate mated, for a real-time combined data set improvement of 2.7 percent.
Speaker 3:And these are girls that, when that rebreeding, these are the girls that hurt the most, in my opinion. They, um, I reckon a girl that's fallen pregnant as a heifer and then come up empty as a first capper. That's the biggest tragedy of all, in my opinion. So we, we, we push that pretty hard and saying that's about a thousand dollar difference, because those are. There's an animal that would have been a highly successful member of the team and now it's, you know, heading down the road with four teeth and only raised one calf. You know it's a economically just you've lost. So it's a 2.7 percent. It says 27 bucks.
Speaker 3:So that puts us right in front 124 versus 37 bucks, which means big money big money winner, winner, chicken dinner.
Speaker 3:You gotta love what you can find on google. But so that's the PDS. But what I want to harp on for a minute is that it's not just about those first two years of an animal's life. This is where things really kick ass. You know, it takes these heifers longer to get back in calf, and so a heifer that conceives at the same time as a cow is going to be later. So by getting them to calve early, we can get them to hopefully calve early as a first calver and then they're going to power forward. We can get him to hopefully calve early as a first calver and then they're going to power forward.
Speaker 3:One of my clients locally um, he's what we do for him is we ai them and they only. We only. He only keeps the heifers from his ai. Everything else he sells on his pre-testing calf. He backs them up for like six weeks and sells them to somebody else's six-week joining, naturally mated with good bulls. He only keeps the heifers that conceived ai and then the next year we ai them again as first calvers and he's getting, like you know, between 70 and 80% conception rate on those and so they're calving again early again, and he was bragging to me. He's getting something like over 90% of his entire cow herd now is calving within the first 21 days of the calving season. He's just monstering it. It's super rad. But this is some kick-ass stuff by Cushman which really illustrates that point. If we can set them up as heifers to succeed, it pays dividends for years.
Speaker 3:So this was, I think, in Miles City, montana. Some lady passed away. Her husband had passed away. She didn't have kids or kids didn't want to farm. She donated her farm to the university and they didn't know what to do. But they did a big twinning study where they just kind of let the cows do what they wanted but they measured everything and they tried to see if twinning was heritable.
Speaker 3:Cushman went back after the study was done a 10-year study, no intervention, but they just kept track of everything and he interrogated the data set. He said I want to work out some interesting stuff, wanted to know. He said if a, if a heifer calved in the first 21 days, how did that affect her longevity and how did it affect her conception rate subsequently and how did it affect her weaning weight subsequently? So if you think of the blue ones as an animal that calved in the first 21 days that they, that's the blue, they stay blue all the way through. And then the second 21 days is the orange and the gray is the last 21 days. And so what happened the next year? So in the first year it was 100% across, all because the MPs had already been pulled out.
Speaker 2:And when they calved.
Speaker 3:That's when they said you're blue, you're an orange, you're a silver. So in the second year, interestingly, as first calvers, if they calved in the first 21 days, their conception rate was 93.5%, whereas if it was the second 21 days was around 87% and if it was in the last 21 days it was down around the 82, 83. But in the third year they still had a better concept, right Still in the low to mid 90s, if they calved in the first 21 days as a heifer, irrespective of what they did as a first calver. And it wasn't until eight years later that they become no longer statistically significant. So that's that pull through of that benefit of having calved early as a heifer.
Speaker 3:And why do they start to kind of merge together? Well, partly because as they start to distribute out, the ones that are on the back heel of that bell curve, they're disappearing from those second and third 21-day groups. They're disappearing the, the ones that that the bell curve distribution, you know, are getting a little bit earlier. They're starting to merge with the full curve of the first 21 days. So if you look at the, the girls that cab in the first 21 days, um, uh, nine years later there's still about 60 of them still on the farm, while there's only about 40 of the ones that cab in the last 21 days. So the only reason they start to cut the whole thing story starts to fall apart.
Speaker 3:Not the only reason, but part of the ones that calved in the last 21 days. So the only reason they start to cut the whole thing, the story starts to fall apart. Not the only reason, but part of the reason is because so many of the other ones have actually exited the system, so we've hurt their longevity significantly. And if you look at weaning weights, the same story bang bang, bang bang bang.
Speaker 3:And Cushman's data said. In the end. In his summation he said if they all get out to eight, nine years will have weaned the numerical value of an additional calf in their lifespan. That's huge. That's pretty cool. It's Brad, it's Brad brother, mark.
Speaker 3:So early and short heifer joining. Early and short heifer calving. Join heifers before for less time. Good selection tool. Older, bigger weaners. Releases extra bulls. Buy heifers more time to get back in calf a second time. We just need a cool slogan for this. Like the best, heifers are pregnant heifers. Yeah, let love pick your keepers. Yeah, I don't know. No tragedy in an empty heifer. I often say this and there is no tragedy in an empty heifer effort. These are empty efforts. They got good value. But here's my favorite slogan that really illustrates the point Don't get married to your efforts Just because you think they look good. Let the AI or the bulls pick your winners. In New Zealand, as you know, this is legal, but over here it's not For a lot of my guys, I do a three to four week mating two rounds of AI or one round back to buy 2%.
Speaker 2:Some guys actually sell them practicing this is actually the dairy I stuck the sticker on a uh, on a little jack russell.
Speaker 3:He came back about 20 minutes later. I reckon one of the dairyman workers just scratched him up as a joke. And, uh, the last thing I say to my coffees is pick your heifers before they're born. You know, um, if we're ai-ing your heifers, keep those progenies. So many of my guys are like you. Don't keep heifers out of your heifers. After I finally got them talked into, I was like, of course we do, man, we just use, like a $70,000 bull over your best genetics. No, we need to. So pick your heifers before they're born. Like my dad, when I went to uni he said you're going to meet a lot of girls, enoch, and I'm like, yeah right, dad, he goes. You know, you just need to make sure you find out what their mother looks like. Jeez, what a horrible bit of advice. Did I get freaking shut down time after time until I freaking learned that was a dummy. He obviously wanted me to join the priesthood.
Speaker 3:It's the same with your cows If you've got a good cow, mate that cow. And if you're keeping your heifers out of your heifers, you've got the opportunity to stratify your cow herd into good cows and not so good cows and not so good cows turnly cross those ladies. Get a char, get a simmy, do something with them and then and then my dream run is to run ai over my cow herd and ai over my heifers. Heifers only get just straight ai, nothing else. Bulls, uh, the cow mob. My good cows get one round of ai and then backed up with a terminal and then the um, the not so good cows. Just a terminal, but pick your heifers before the barn.
Speaker 3:Because this guy's the same age as me and I thought he was the coolest guy in the world but alas, he grew into a heroin addict. So you never know what they're going to turn into. Always look to the dam, like my dad said, when cows good udders, good feet. She's got really good feet 50 years old. Get good bulls, look these guys. You just never know what something's going to grow into and it's amazing how many free martins you run into. Here's a blonde-acted, tanned red Angus. This little dude here, low birth weight. He's regularly the scuttle circumference of superior, but I doubt it. He's not known for veracity. I'm taking the trick out of it. I think he's got a low scuttle circumference.
Speaker 3:This is the cool thing about the PDS we did some surveys where we got in front of a crowd, passed around a survey. These are actually the core producers. We asked them do you think this is going to be good? And they were kind of like, yeah, we're going to give it a try. After the trial finishes I'm going to continue to AI. It's going to give me better bulk price, bulk purchasing flexibility. It's going to make my headquarters quieter. It's going to make my heifers quieter. It's gonna make my calving season easier. It's gonna save my labor costs. It's gonna be profitable, it's gonna be affordable. It's gonna increase my weaning weights. It's gonna improve my heifer rebreeding rate, my heifer conception rate. And if you look at the scores, especially the labor costs people were negative on. But on all of them they're kind of like meh. But. But after the trial they were just like fuck, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's just like the stuff on Bevo Central.
Speaker 2:It's just like guys, these aren't estimates.
Speaker 3:It's like this is real stuff, this is real life. I mean, we hijack these heifers and expose them to this opportunity.
Speaker 3:And look, it pays dividends Like this isn't a thought experiment, this is real life stuff, this is achievable, this is doable. Ai is not just affordable, it's profitable. And then when we did some post-field days, we surveyed the producers that came to a big field day. We said what do you reckon? And then we gave a jibber-jabber like we just did now. And then they went oh, I can see that I'm going to give this a crack and did now. And then they went oh, I can see that I'm going to give this a crack, and that's the goal of a pds see if you can convey the value of interventions to producers. So again at that same survey, we said look, are you considering using fixed time ai? The answer was uh, was um kind of meh and then post survey.
Speaker 3:you know we went from 44 saying yep, we're gonna, I'm gonna consider it to 70, so they would consider it, which is pretty cool. That's what we like to see, because these dudes work for us and if they calve early and improve our genetics, they're a good employee. Because what do you see here? I see a heifer that needs AI. What do you see here? That's my dog. Love the heat, get in the kitchen. This is the morning I went to AI for a guy. A guy took a photo, so that's why they call it on heat. Just the exertion of riding each other. It's pretty cool. Steam. Before you try to AI him. This is my wife. Make sure they're not pregnant. That's my son, eli. That's Louis. I finally got a heifer and I even got an Angus. That's my son, angus, and I'm a big fan of weaning early and if my son comes home like that, I'm going to wean him early.
Speaker 3:there you go join more heifers, join them short and early. Preg, test early, cab with feed, wean early and consider ai and definitely do a producer demonstration site.
Speaker 1:That's the go excellent, beautiful sales pitch, mate. What, five years on from that survey? What? How many of your those producers are still ai heifers? Has there been any, any reversion, or is or is it just going up and up?
Speaker 3:um, I reckon 70 percent of my producers are ai. Um, yeah, we've had some really tough seasons where people didn't keep their heifers, so a few guys dropped out. Um, but ai seems to locally. Just every year we pick up a couple more people, a couple more people and um, I think eventually it'll just become standard practice, much like the dairy industry. You wouldn't speak to many dairymen that don't AI, I think AI. In my opinion, someone else said this.
Speaker 3:I'm not the first guy to say it, but another person and a producer talked years ago said a heifer that isn't AI is a missed opportunity, and I think that's true. And the, the synchronization programs that we've got are just so much more reliable as long as we can hang on to estradiol. And if we do lose estradiol then, um, if we can, you know, make it work with gnrh. But look, I, uh, you're really seeing a lot mark in the in the wagyu job. Yeah, um, but you, that F1 is the value of that.
Speaker 3:F1 is completely predicated on the quality of the sire and also Wagyus tend to be relatively good for calving ease. So it's kind of a win-win over large groups of heifers to supply that marketplace. But I just wish the seed stock industry, like my local seed stock producers, for the most part they get it and they're like oh, that's cool what you're doing. And, if anything, by integrating fixed time AI we've seen a real shift in the producers in regard to the bulls that they select. Also, they're reading breed plan a lot better than they used to Now. They used to just buy the good looking bull, which sometimes led to problems, but I think, a much better understanding of replan and you know there's so much measurement and effort that's gone into creating those EBVs and if you can't measure it you can't manage it. But if you don't understand how to capitalize on that measurement then you're not going to be able to use it to improve your outcomes either. So that's a real win, I think a greater appreciation of replan.
Speaker 1:Yep, because if you're writing a semen catalog you kind of have to. You've only really got the numbers to look at, and so, and if I had a lot to in the video, yeah, you've got a picture there too.
Speaker 3:But a lot of that's. You know genetics in a bucket? Yeah, yeah, you know what I mean. So I think we've got to reach a stage where all the stakeholders see the merit, see the value, and it's it's just, it's just an evolving process. Yeah, um, it's, I don't. I don't believe, like, if 20 of your cow herd is heifers and we're reducing your, your bull requirements by a third, essentially we're reducing bull purchasing requirements by 3.333 percent and I I don't see why a seed stock producer would feel threatened by that. Um, I think part of it's just the, the.
Speaker 3:There's the occasional guy who tries to raise their own bulls from the, from the ai. I think that that alarms people and I say to guys well, what do you know about the mother? Like you know, your local seed stock producer has generations of data that to give you a predictable outcome in regard to feet, in regard to attitude, growth, etc. Etc. I mean, I can give you a hell of a good sire, but you don't really know much about the mother. So I try to generally discourage people from trying to raise their own bulls.
Speaker 1:But I mean that's, I guess, what seed stock producers want to hear, and and there'll be people listening now that want to hear that I guess with genomics now you can actually learn something about those females. So I mean there's, I mean Well.
Speaker 3:I don't know about New Zealand, but in Australia they've really limited access to genomics. You can do a heifer select which gives you a small suite of EBVs, but I think you've got to be a registered Angus seed stock producer in order to get full access to the suite of genomics. Yeah, that's a discussion for the whole.
Speaker 1:there's ways and means, I suppose, with the IGS and stuff, but anyway we don't need to get into that. But the one thing I just did want to pick up on before we close out is that 2.7, the average matings of a bull are 2.7, which is probably one of the biggest problems I hear in the industry is just bull longevity, just not getting enough matings out of bulls. Have you got any data on that? Is a particular people doing better with how long they're getting out of a bull? They just seem to want to break all the time.
Speaker 3:So just going back to Phil Holmes again, and I was speaking at the Hereford National and he said look, the Hereford bulls are averaging six joinings, which is a lot. There's two sides to that story, though, if I look at an Angus bull that I bought six years ago. So we do a lot of pre-breeding bull work in Esperance. You know, we do a fair bit of jump testing, which isn't done that much anymore these days, and semen testing, and I'll pull the bulls up on breed plan as I'm doing them and we'll look at them, and sometimes we'll have a bull who's kind of a little bit on the fence and with my producer there I'll say, oh geez, this bull, this guy's got some real merit. I think we should maybe give him another crack. And then another bull will be like oh geez, this guy, he might have been a good bull when you bought him, but he's, you know, the breed moves on, so I think we can. That bull longevity is a real issue. The biggest issue, I think, is that first season wastage, and so one of the PDSs that we're working on right now, and we've got a little bit of success. I mean numerical success last year in reducing bull wastage by 5%, but there's still a long way to go to prove the concept.
Speaker 3:But we in Esperance, at least we perceive that there is an infectious bovine bolanopostitis and pustular vulvovaginitis, which is a bovine yeah, that's unhelpful, I call it exploding dick syndrome, which is a heck of a lot easier to remember. But it's a bovine herpes virus and the IVR vaccines that we use in feedlots, especially rhinovirus, it was designed from an IVP-BBI slit and what that virus does is it creates little ulcers on the penis and prepuce and we see a lot of bulls, young bulls, first season bulls. A lot like most of them, like probably 90% of the bulls that break down with melanobocytosis or, you know, inflamed penis and prepuce, are first season bulls, within the first two to three weeks of joining. And so we started screening them and found that they were seropinverting, meaning that antibodies to bovine herpes virus, which is the same as the you know same assay as what we use screening for IVR infectious bovine rhinotrapeitis.
Speaker 3:You know the feedlot assay is what you screening for IVR infectious bovine rhino tracheitis. You know the feedlot. So we thought, well, heck, let's get this feedlot vaccine rhino guard and and give it to the bulls. So we started doing that and our producers locally perceive. And in the PDS we you know, we surveyed them at the end of the first year and said do you perceive that the, the vaccine is helping you and do you intend to continue using it? On the nine to ten scale I think it came out at 9.3.
Speaker 3:So the producers strongly believe that it is assisting them in managing melanoblastitis. But when we actually looked at the numbers and we I rang every producer, I could get hold of an esperance and said, look, were your roles vaccinated, were they not? Um, we had a 15 breakdown rate in the vaccines and a 20 breakdown in the non-vaccinates. So it's well. So we had an improvement. It was. It was disappointingly underwhelming. So we'll see what we come up with this year. This year hasn't been as bad and I think there's a whole bunch of things that go in there that combine. I think that the environmental conditions were very sandy here and last year was incredibly wet, and so I think if they're in a very sandy paddock where the, the mud is very gritty and sandy, I think it causes it, abrades, the um, the um, penis and prep use. But I think this but a concurrent infection with ibppv, I believe is a is a significant risk factor, and so we're trying to, we're trying to prove that it's actually worth doing.
Speaker 3:There was, there was an article in Beef Central about that as well. Um and um. That that's probably the biggest issue. The other one I wonder about is like I'm getting ready to go through my own bulls, um, here next week and I'm going to run them in and go through them and divide, got three different manager groups are going out into and I'm going to what I'm going to do, I and I'm going to what I'm going to do. I'm going to give them rhinoguard and then the other option is MH plus IBR as the other vaccine, but two doses.
Speaker 3:I'm going to take them, split them into three different management groups as bulls and park them for a couple of weeks before they go to work and then hopefully just keep an eye on them to make sure that they're comfortable with each other and rather than, I think, chucking bulls out from out.
Speaker 3:You got your bull paddock and you go and you gather, you know they've got their hierarchy and they're mostly sitting in their corners and they kind of hate each other but they just mostly just send bad texts to each other. You know they, uh, you take a handful of them and chuck them in a paddock together and you've taken out Cletus, the wonder thumper, who was keeping everybody under control. And now you got, you know, joe Bob and Billy Bob, who decided to have a scrap to see who's the new top dog within that cohort, and so I don't know if it's beneficial or not, but I'm going to try to run my bulls in a little cohort before I put them out in the paddock, and I'm going to make a little help with some of these stifle issues.
Speaker 3:That's a big one is, you know, a cow's on the job and another just comes in smokes, stifle, but, but the but, the penile breakdown stuff is just soul crushing. Last year I got in a hurry and it was in the trial mark like, yeah, because I was doing the trial with the rhino guard, I've got I'll pick up these three new wolves and I was putting them out with my first cavers. It's like, oh, they'll be all the same age, first ca coverage, pretty small frame, they'll be right. I was like I should vaccinate them and I was like, oh, I won't vaccinate them just for the benefit of the trial and blow me down. Every one of those bastards broke down in the world, every one of them. I'm like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:You'll know that for next time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely vaccinate them this year, because, yeah, that was a that was a painfully expensive process. Yeah, like my grandfather used to say that about me, you know I'd be running around. You're like a bull in a china closet, son, what you don't break your shit on all right, we better leave it there.
Speaker 1:We're about to crack the hour, but uh, that's been awesome to to hear that pds and just uh, just all of your experience. We'll make sure we find your youtube channel and and uh, hook that up in the show notes as well as your uh swans vet there if anyone wants to get in touch and have a yarn yeah, check out a sheep and beef.
Speaker 3:That's our producer group. Um, we're doing some cool stuff and we hope to continue to do some cool stuff, and thanks a lot for putting me on the head, shepherd brother excellent mate, excellent mate, great to chat. Cheers brother Mark.
Speaker 1:Thanks, mate. Thanks again to Heinegger, who are proud world leaders in the manufacturing and supply of professional sheep shearing and clipping equipment. Thank you to MNSD Animal Health and Norflex Livestock Intelligence. They offer an extensive livestock product portfolio focused on animal health management, all backed up by exceptional service. We thank both of these companies for their ongoing support of the Head Shippen podcast.
