SELECTIONS - Fall 2001
Kicking the Bad Habit
By Mel DeJarnette, reproductive specialist
We all have heard that human beings are "creatures of habit,"
but have you ever stopped to notice how true this is? Think
about your morning rituals as you dress and prepare for the day.
With two legs and two feet, there is a 50-50 probability as to
which leg would go into the pants first or which shoe will go on
first. However, whether it’s the left or the right one first, 90
percent of us do it in the same sequence 90 percent of the time.
Through continuous repetition it becomes so natural that it is
difficult to break the routine. Test yourself tomorrow by putting
the opposite leg in your pants first. It can wreck your whole day.
So what do habits have to do with reproduction and getting cows
pregnant? The short answer: lots! Once you develop a routine, you
basically start performing the task without thinking about it.
Chores seem to get done automatically while your brain runs on
autopilot. Habits and routines are great things to have as long a
s they are good ones.
Bad habits usually originate from an isolated attempt to take a
shortcut on some procedure that seems unnecessary or too complicated.
Short-term success leads to a false sense of security that eventually
develops into a routine procedure that is "asking for trouble."
Although bad habits usually lead to problems in the reproductive-management
program, often bad habits may be better than no habits at all. At least
with a bad habit, it’s easy to repeat what you’re doing, identify the problem
and then take measures to convert the bad habit into a good one. Lack of habits
makes troubleshooting extremely difficult.
Let’s discuss areas where bad habits or lack of habits can create problems
for the breeding program.
Semen Handling
Semen handling is highly prone to the development of bad habits. Proper semen
handling can be subdivided into three major areas of concern: temperature, time
and hygiene. Each area has specific recommendations that, while they may seem trivial,
can have a huge effect on the success of an A.I. program.
Temperature Control
Keep unused straws frozen. This statement seems so simple, but raising straws
too high or holding them too long in the neck tube of the tank are the most commonly
violated semen-handling principles of all. The damage caused when semen temperature
rises above about minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit and then returns to liquid-nitrogen
temperature is both dramatic and irreversible. To keep the quality of semen in
your tank optimal, develop the following GOOD habits:
- Use tweezers for straw retrieval. If you work on a dairy, your fingers have
enough calluses that you’re really not worried about getting them burned by
liquid nitrogen. However, tweezers are usually longer than fingers and allow
you to keep unused straws lower in the tank during retrieval.
- Keep an up-to-date semen inventory card. This allows you to go directly
to the canister needed without unnecessarily subjecting straws to warmer
temperatures while rummaging through the tank to find the bull you want.
- Once semen is thawed at 95 F, maintain that temperature until it is
deposited in the cow. Don’t take for granted that the environmental
temperature is not cold enough to do damage or that wrapping the gun in
a paper towel is sufficient. Make a habit of placing the wrapped and loaded
gun as close to the body as possible, year round. Occasionally, test your
thermal-protection procedures by doing a "dummy-run" using a thermometer
instead of an A.I. gun.
Time
It’s a good habit and a standard recommendation to thaw no more straws than
can be deposited in the cow within 10 to 15 minutes (10 preferred). This
is mainly a problem when the semen-thawing area and the cows to be inseminated
are not in close proximity. In these situations, technicians often will
batch-thaw straws to increase efficiency and reduce the number of trips
back and forth. Mobile semen-thawing facilities, such as a cart, GATOR®
or an old van, cut down on both the time and distance from thaw bath to cow,
diminishing the need for batch-thawing.
Some studies have suggested thawing more than two straws at once compromises
fertility. More recent studies, however, refute these findings and suggest
batch-thaws of five to eight straws have no adverse affect on fertility
(provided recommended time and temperature constraints are observed).
This stands to reason as straw number is an arbitrary value. The more
straws you thaw, the longer it will take to use them all and, thus, the
more opportunity there is for something to go wrong. The sperm in a straw
could care less if you name them "1" or "5," but they most certainly can
tell whether you are maintaining temperature or taking too long to get
to the cow. Again, do a "dummy-run" sometime to see how long it takes to
get from the thaw-bath to uterus. You may be surprised.
Hygiene
An often-overlooked aspect of semen handling is hygiene. The cow’s uterus
is highly susceptible to infection if bacteria are introduced through
careless semen-handling procedures. To find out whether you have developed
any "bad" hygienic habits, answer these questions. Would you store your
lunch in your breeding kit? Are the sheathes clean enough to use as drinking
straws? Would you drink the water from your thaw-bath? Would you eat a
marshmallow roasted on the end of your A.I. gun? Although I wouldn’t recommend
any of the above even if the answer were "yes," if the mere thought turns
your stomach, then it’s probably time to "clean up your act."
Heat Detection
The biggest problem with heat detection is not "bad" habits, but lack of
any habits at all. Often when I ask a herdsman about the heat-detection
program, I hear something like this: "We don’t really have a set time to
watch for heats. Everyone just watches for heats all the time as we go
about our daily chores."
In some places I have seen this system actually work. However, more often
than not, the above quote can be translated to: "If, in our travels through
the barn, we are knocked to the ground by a cow in heat, we’ll usually
write the number down. That is, unless we think someone else saw it, in
which case we assume the other person wrote the number down."
To be successful, a heat-detection program must be routine, systematic and
habitual. Part of the reason heat detection does not receive the attention
it once did is that in many herds, it’s become an overwhelming task. The
old recommendations were to heat detect for 20 to 30 minutes each morning
and late afternoon. However, these recommendations were developed when the
average herd size was well below 100 cows. Newsflash!: you can’t do a good
job of heat detection in a 500-cow herd in a 20- to 30-minute period. In
reality, we need to spend about 20 minutes per 100 cows. For herds exceeding
1,000 cows, efficient heat detection requires almost 24-hour surveillance.
That much heat detection is a hard habit to develop. However, systematically
incorporating estrous-detection aids, such as chalk, paint, KAMAR® or
BOVINE BEACON®, into your heat-detection programs provides 24-hour surveillance
with minimal labor investment. Daily evaluation and touch up of these aids
is then a much easier habit to establish. Of course these systems do have
limitations, but in most herds they have proven to be far better than the
alternative of using no heat- detection aids. Until you make heat detection
systematic, automatic and habitual in your herd, you likely will not be
happy with your herd’s reproductive performance.
Systematic Breeding Programs
Increasing herd size and the difficulties of heat detection have led to
the development of a number of new "systematic" breeding programs for dairy
cattle. Target breeding, Modified-Target Breeding, Select Synch, Ovsynch and
Modified-Ovsynch are just a few. Each of these systems is designed to
systematically incorporate hormone injections into the reproductive-management
program to reduce or eliminate the need for heat detection. However, just like
heat detection, the key to making them work and realizing a return on your
investment is to implement the program systematically or "habitually."
All too often I see herd managers try to incorporate these systems in a
haphazard or almost random approach. Cows are not assigned to the program
until they are late in lactation, and even then there is no set procedure
for identifying when to treat cows and when not to.
Even worse are attempts to incorporate the protocols without complying with
the protocol recommendations. Shots often are skipped or given at non-prescribed
times, which alters the program’s effectiveness. Each of the aforementioned
systems has specific advantages and disadvantages that may allow one system to
work best in your herd, while another protocol may be better for your neighbor.
However, the key to success for all protocols is to consistently and habitually
assign cows to the program, and follow the protocol exactly as prescribed. If
you start to randomly pick and choose when to treat cows or which cows to treat,
then the result usually turns out to be a higher bill for hormones with little
or no measurable improvement in reproductive efficiency.
In today’s large dairies, procedures must be implemented in a systematic
approach if we have any hope of them being successful. The absence of a
"routine" approach, leaves too many things to chance, and often adds complexity
to the system. The profitability of your dairy depends on habits. Develop lots
and lots of good ones!
®GATOR is a registered trademark of Deere & Company, Moline, Ill.; BOVINE BEACON is a registered trademark of Omniglow Corp., W. Springfield, Mass.; KAMAR is a registered trademark of Kamar Marketing Group Inc., Steamboat Springs, Colo.
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