BEEF HERD HEALTH

BY W. MARK HILTON, DVM

 Talk to any veterinarian who does a significant amount of beef work and he or she will have stories of a group of cows that went “0 for” at pregnancy check. Maybe it was a group of heifers with the yearling bull that had zero out of 12 bred, or a group of 30 cows with a mature bull that “got them all pregnant each of the past three years,” but zero this year.

My first case was just six months into practice when I went to sleeve a group of 25 cows that spent almost three months with a rented bull. When the first cow that walks into the chute is open, it causes a little angst. When it is the first four, we start thinking, “oh no.”

We checked all 25 just to be sure – and the owner told me a few years later he wondered at the time if this new veterinarian knew what he was doing – and all were open. The owner was upset, and I felt terrible.

What could have prevented this and nearly every other “0 for” disaster? A breeding soundness examination (BSE) of the bull ahead of the breeding season.

Every bull should have a BSE before every breeding season. In some areas of the country, it is common to have a spring and fall calving season.

One of my former veterinary students knew I love real-life examples to use for teaching purposes and told me about one of his clients. The producer has a spring and fall calving season and always did a BSE on his bull each spring but skipped it in the fall. He used timed AI and then turned in the bull for 65 days in both breeding seasons.

At fall pregnancy check, the spring calvers were 95% pregnant as usual. The following spring pregnancy check of the fall calvers revealed 55% pregnant and all appeared to be bred to the AI date. A BSE the following day on the clean-up bull revealed zero sperm.

In both above cases, the owner could have paid for BSEs in their bulls for the next 50 years and still been money ahead by investing in the BSE.

If your herd health veterinarian is a member of the American Association of Bovine Practitioners (AABP), he or she can download a spreadsheet to examine the cost effectiveness of a BSE for your specific herd. I ran the numbers for a typical herd in my area.

Bull purchase price = $5,000; bull useful life = 5 years; bull averaged 25 cows per season; BSE cost = $75 (includes owner labor and DVM cost); 555-pound average weaning weight; calf price = $281/cwt (prices as per Bluegrass Stockyards, 2/13/24); 95 percent calf crop.

Studies show that 10-20 percent of all bulls are infertile or subfertile, so in the example above we look at the impact of moving from a 95 percent calf crop to an 85 percent calf crop. This would be what could happen in a large herd that has 10 bulls with 250 cows and one of the bulls was infertile and got zero cows pregnant.

In the example above, the return on investment is 49:1. That means that for every dollar you invested in the BSE, you received $49 in return.

This is the most cost-effective procedure your herd health veterinarian can do for you as a beef producer. It is more cost-effective than pregnancy checking cows, controlling flies or implanting calves. To use an investing analogy, it’s like buying an acre of land for $5,000 and selling it for $245,000 the following year.

Remember, EVERY bull gets a BSE before EVERY breeding season.