Good evening everyone, and thank you for joining us for tonight's BCVA webinar. My name is Sarah and I'll be chairing the webinar tonight. Our speaker Joe is happy to remain online for questions at the end, so please type any that you may have in the Q&A box during.

In the webinar, and I'll save your questions for the end of the presentation. If you have any technical difficulties, please let us know by using the Q&A box, and we will do our best to assist you. If you can't see the Q&A box, if you move your mouse, then the taskbar should become visible at the bottom of the screen.

So it's my pleasure tonight to introduce Joe Henry as our speaker. Joe graduated from Glasgow in 1998 and has since worked in both Northumberland and New Zealand, primarily focusing on preventative medicine, production KPIs and grazing management in suckler. The herds and sheep flocks.

In 2018, he also undertook a study tour of large cow calf operations in western USA. Outside of his role as a director of Black Sheep Farm Health, Joe runs a farm with his wife Rachel, which includes a Ling-based herd of around 100 head. He also provides the veterinary input to the East Northumberland Farmers Club benchmarking group, which was founded in 2013.

All of this experience means that Joe is the perfect speaker for tonight's topic, which is health planning and KPIs in suckler herds. So now I'll hand over to Joe. Thank you very much, sir, and thank you very much to everybody for joining and, and listening.

Right, well, we'll dive straight in. Our practise is in Northumberland, which is the bit of England, if you're like me, I, I used to think Scotland started at Newcastle, but actually there's a bit of England above Hadrian's Wall, and that's where we are. And we think our practise is the only sheep and beef only practise in the UK, possibly in Europe.

We've had to make the practise work just with sheep and beef work. We don't have any dairy farms or smallies or anything like that, so that's just a bit of background to us. Right, suckler vet work is very seasonal.

Nearly all our farms are block calving and that's for ease of management. And because of that, we do different jobs at different times of the year. And really the thing is to focus on those jobs that will have a big impact.

On productivity and So this month I'll mostly be testing bulls. The following month I'll mostly be checking heifers, and that's the sort of way our year goes round, which makes it quite, well, for me, I quite enjoy that variety. It's important to be proactive.

Farmers are busy people, and quite often the little things that make big differences are forgotten about or lost off in the hurly-burly of their busy farmers farming lives. So you have to get out there, get speaking to farmers and actually don't wait for the work to come to you. You've got to go chasing it.

And the other important thing about suckler vet work is to try and always focus on the herd, it's population medicine to a certain extent, and the impact on the production, er, the fertility, the weaning percentage, the weaning weights. Monitoring the disease incident and such like, and there's masses of work out there and I'll talk about that later, that isn't being done, and I think there's a real opportunity for us to work as, as farm vets to work with beef farmers to improve. So, AHDB farm bench, which shows increased profitability in suckler herds from a number of different things.

Low fixed costs are really important. Clearly not every farm can outwinter cattle like these are here, but outwintering is one way of really reducing the fixed costs. But even if they can, farmers can shorten the winter, that actually reduces their costs quite a bit, do some, some of this sort of thing.

Although variable costs are obviously important, although a lot of farms, I think, trim the variable costs pretty well, . But, but you need to be, especially feed and forage, you know, they tend to be fairly big chunks of, of, of money. And also output, and the more output there is, the more the fixed costs and the variable costs of the beef farms are spread.

So the more kilos of beef. The cow cow per cow bull produces, then the more those costs are spread. And so that in effect drives a greater profitability.

And because most of our farms are limited land area, I think really we should start to think about output of beef, not just per cow, but per hectare, which is something that they do a lot in other parts of the world more than we are doing. But let's start, start with per cow, but I think it's probably just a stepping stone. And farmers generally love numbers and, but it's still amazing how many don't know the average weaning weight of their calves.

And we'll talk a bit about the importance of that later, but basically they're not measuring their output always that well. And for all vet costs, often we get, you know, the vets are going to make or break the farm and we'll go bust spending all this money on the vet. Often the vet costs are only 4 to 5% of the total cost of production, which is a bit like the cost of.

So, and actually a lot of our more profitable farms are spending a bit more than that, but the key is to be spending it where they'll get a return on investment. So if that vet cost is mostly caesareans. Then yes, you know, that's a, that's a poor way of spending that money.

But if it's vaccinations to boo boost fertility, checking the bulls, feeding the cows, that sort of thing, then there will be a much better return on it. Right, so the output that we've talked about there to try and spread the cost is, is basically it's a three legged stool without any one of these legs, it comes, it comes crashing down. So we've got genetics and we'll be talking a bit more about that later on in terms of how to measure the possibilities of the genetics.

Nutrition, which is absolutely key, and, and the more the older I get, the more I realise if you get the nutrition right, a lot of the rest falls into place. And, disease levels and obviously being vets know plenty about disease that impact on production. So why does this ball look like this?

. And really there's a number of different reasons depending on what it's been fed, whether it was . Born to a heifer or to a cow, how old it is. What's it's health status, it's genetics.

But the only thing he can pass on when a farmer buys a new bull is it. The only thing he can pass on to his herd is his genetics. The fact that he's been fed 15 kg of cake a day for, several months, that in no way can be passed on to his herd.

So I think try and get the farmers to realise that when they're buying nugen bulls and tups, they're actually just buying a parcel of genetics, and the only way of measuring the potential of that genetics is through the use of EBVs and it's . It's, it's feeding, not breeding that unfortunately sometimes wins the day. So this slide just prompts me to say that basically you could feed a racehorse donkey feed and you wouldn't win any races.

But equally you could feed a donkey racehorse feed, and you still wouldn't win any races. And really it's just to, to make the point that feeding for the correct stage of production and to target body condition score is absolutely crucial and We can get pretty hung up on trace elements and diseases and stuff, but if they're not actually getting enough energy and protein at the right times, then, the whole thing comes tumbling down. In terms of health and health planning, think about the.

We, we do is that we absolutely limit link the health to the production. And a way of measuring and objectively measuring the health is through the production. And so by managing and measuring the production, we can get a handle on where their health is.

And generally, we're vets, we love talking about diseases. One of the reasons we're interested in this sort of thing, often farmers are less excited about diseases and more driven by the financials. And.

An example of something like the Yoni's Premium cattle Health scheme testing for yoni in that. We have Maybe costs £8 a cow to test for yoni in the lab works 4 pounds 50 by the time you've gone out there taking a blood tube at the time and stuff probably costs about 8 pounds. So to, to test a herd of 100 cows is going to cost 800 quid.

Now, the price of a curled cow is about 800 quid, especially if, if you end up having a cow die you're using and you end up having to pay the Aquaman 50 or 60 quid. So if you only find a 1% incidence of yoni in your herd, the test has paid for itself. And I can't believe how few herds, beef herds in other parts of the country are actually other than the pedigree ones, are checking for yonis, and I think it's a sort of a pretty much non-brainer because if you've got less than 1%, you probably need to know about that and be selling breeding stock anyway.

If you've got greater than 1%, you got, you get a really good return on your investment. And it's those sorts of conversations that rather than just talking about. Yonies per se and transfers from how to calf and spreads this way and that actually link that to the financials that I think better engagement can be made.

So where are we now in terms of our output and production amongst our suckler farmers? Well, the latest figures for the farm bench do aren't that easy to access because they haven't got a massive sample size, but the ones from the stock take, from 1617. They, they're pretty much, they have improved over the last few years, but nothing like say output of milk.

And They're not brilliant. So, particularly if you look there down there at calving period of 18 weeks and the target less than 12 weeks, and I think even that target's pretty generous. I think 10 weeks is plenty really for a bullying period, .

When you speak to sheep farmers, you say, why do you have Why do you have a, a tight lambing period, and they can give you loads of different answers why they like to have everything lambed within a month or 6 weeks, generally to do with ease of management and logistics. And getting even batches of lambs off, and a lot of those farmers also have suckler cows and you say, well why don't you have that for the suckler cows? Oh.

And it's exactly the same reasons, and really we should be aiming for a calving like a lambing. And then I think more than that is, is inefficiency, and actually it is able to be happening. But for those farms there, getting 90% in calf setting lying down in 18 weeks is pretty blinking moderate, really.

You should be getting in the low low to mid 90s in 10 weeks, and that will really drive that's all the extra calves. And the other great thing about tightening your calving period is you'll have more calves born in the 1st 3 weeks, and we'll talk about that later. But that's a, a real KPI headline KPI I want to look at there.

And that, those farms there average 37%. By having more calves born in the 1st 3 weeks, you'll, that's the best way of lifting the average weaning weight, i.e., producing more kilos of calf per cow put to the bull.

And there's far we have farms that That now are getting to that stage 3 weeks, and they're sending texts through saying we made 72% this year. 73%, 66%. It's very, very achievable target that.

And I'll talk more about that later. In terms of the vet meed costs £34 I mean, no wonder they're only getting 90% in calf in 18 weeks. 34 pounds is a woeful amount.

You can hardly do all the routine medications for that, let alone actually do any proactive pool testing and feeding, tracing monitoring that sort of thing. So. All in all, this shows that there's a lot of work that is being missed out, and this group of farms are actually self-selected as farms that are putting their figures into into their stock.

So they're probably the better farms, which is showing how much, you know, the other people that just leave the bull in all year round, get a calf every 15 months from them or what have you. It, it's very hard to make money from suckler cows anyway, and it certainly isn't if your performance is worse than. We relate health plans to production, as I've said, the way scales that we actually rent out for free to any of our farmers that want to have a, want to weigh their calves, the wage rate, and that's because we think measuring output is absolutely critical, and so.

Farms are generally pretty good at, . So bas are generally pretty good at numbers. They a lot of them will know how many silage bales they'll get per field, how many tonnes of corn they'll make per acre.

They're scanning, sheep scanning, 204% this year, 202 last year. And yet, There's been a bit of laxity in terms of knowing their weaning production. And so But actually, once they get onto it, farmers really do enjoy this and again they start comparing their weaning weights with previous years.

It's the sort of thing that does excite them. And it's those weaning weights that are actually. They're within the farmers' control.

Some of them are just taking what money they get for their calves and comparing that year on year. Well actually the price they get for the calves is largely out with their control in that it could be a bad year for beef or what have you, and so the prints per kilo is going down, but the amount of kilos is in their control, and that's what they have to work with. And by, by measuring those when the calves come through to get the parasite medication or pneumonia vaccine, really key.

So you can say this, this is one particular farm and it's gradually going up in, in cow numbers. And it records all this information and and what that does is it then allows us to concentrate on the areas where we can make a difference. If a farmer's got.

67% barren cows. It does in a 10 week bullying period. There's no need to spend ages and ages talking about lepto and IVR and DVD and such like, because.

His, his fertility's pretty good already. If he does, if he's actually got cases of respiratory disease, and then that flags up on this and he can concentrate on his respiratory disease. And so, It basically makes the the health planning meeting.

It makes it a bit more useful to the farmer, not just talking about diseases at length, which often we vets find it exciting. And also it's really useful for when you go and review the health plans, because you can compare with how it was the previous year. I'd just like to point out that we have There's quite a lot of farms that don't drift to treat any calves for pneumonia, and that's not because.

They're not treating them and the calves are dying, but they're getting things right. And when I've spoken to farmers at beef events and things like that, there are some farmers that think it's, it's normal. You have young cattle, you will get pneumonia.

It's like to put that out that that actually if you get everything right, that's not the case. So this table we use it is much the same as all the rest in all the benchmark. The QMS will have one in Scotland.

HCG will have one in Wales. As I say, Farm Bench has one, in England, and really it's just a, a data capture thing. Ideally send it out to the farmer a week or so beforehand.

Inevitably it doesn't get filled in properly until you're sitting around the kitchen table with carving books. Various diaries and stuff like that, but . Generally, with a bit of training, it, it improves.

So with the annual cycle. The the seasonality is so key, you're doing different things and so getting the cows set up for mating is an absolutely crucial time. Partly that is done before calving in that some of, some farms still seem to think it's the thing to do is to starve your cows in the last 6 weeks, 2 months of pregnancy, and that will ensure you get an easy calving rather than choosing.

An easy calving bull on his figures, but, a cow's condition at carving directly correlates with how soon she'll come bully. And if you think that A gestation is sort of 285 days and you want a calf every year. That's only about 80 odd days to get, to get them in calf.

So it's pretty important to get all this right and not to have the cows too lean at calving, . Ideally they should be at their target condition score mid-pregnancy, 2 2.5 to 3.

But when they go into the ball, so these, these are things to be talking about while we're checking heifers and semen testing balls, but Basically, the nutrition needs to be right. The ideally it should be a rising pain of nutrition, and for spring carving herds, this should come naturally in that they're going from silage to grass. The only things to look out for is such like drought if they've got too many sheep eating up all the grass in front of them.

But it's absolutely essential, all the rest of this falls by the wayside if, if they're not getting enough. Actual Energy and protein. Make sure their vaccinations are up to date.

BVD, every cow should have BVD vaccine. It's one of those no-brainers. I can't understand why it's not sort of 95% penetration, .

If you have BVD, you need to vaccinate. If you don't have BVD, and you get it in, you'll have an absolute disaster, so it's a cheap insurance. So, I've seen that many times that farmers think they can keep it out and they can't.

The farms are not beef and sheep farms are not islands. So yeah, make sure that their BVD vaccinations up to date, . IVR I think that's an issue.

Personally, I think the jury is still out slightly about actually whether it's proven, to always cause, efficiency savings. It does in some occasions, but not all. Things like lepto, even if the status is negative, if they're at high risk size, what we do is look at the fertility is good, they don't have lepto, but actually they've got burns and rivers running down through their farm that come from cattle farms further up of status unknown, and that's obviously a risk factor.

They could get lepto and a cheap insurance to bunk 23 quid vaccine into the mix there. Campylobacter, venerealis. Foetus, very, very underdiagnosed, because it's such a nightmare to try and diagnose.

But, if, if you've got that and you can get the vaccine, then, make sure that's in or in plenty of time before the ball goes out. I think it's important, we'll talk about heifers later to keep them separate from the cows, especially first calves if you're carving it too, . So that they carry on growing and hopefully get the best of stuff, and you can maybe put the cows sucking twins and such like in with them.

Mineral status is important. I don't think it's important as the energy and protein, . This part of the world, there's really big selenium and iodine deficiencies, and it's pretty common practise to get the cows bolus a month pre-calving, so the calves are born with good levels and, obviously another benefit of having a tight bullying period is that that pre-calving bolus is still working for bullying time.

So you're getting sort of two bites out of the one, bolus. Things like matritis, I think cows that have held their cleansings or had twins or milk feeds or whatever should be checked 3 weeks later, and that can make a real difference to getting these cows that have twins back in calves the following year. So checking the bull pre-breeding is obviously absolutely crucial.

1 in 4 bulls is subfertile and. You know, that's been, we've looked at figures in practises that I've worked in. Alex Walders has looked at that and presented a BCVA.

1 in 4 is a big number and because of that, all balls need to be checked each year. It's absolutely not the case that once fertile, always fertile. And part of that is checking the, you know, the That they can actually get around the cows that haven't just been stuck in a 10 by 10 box all summer and then expected to run around the hills serving cows, but check feet, legs, genital alia, all those things, and it's really important to make sure their vaccines are up to date, the same as the cows are not given just the day before they go in.

But just the same, mineral, you know, give, make sure they have their mineral bonuses if that's needed, . And we'll talk a lot more about the EBVs later, but, it's quite a good idea. All registered bulls have EBVs, so while you're doing the bull checks, if the farmer is unaware of his, bull's EBVs, he can just run them there and then or add them into your bull testing reports.

Just go on in website, Simi website, Angus website, and you type in the bull's tag number and you'll, you'll get his EBVs. And that you can have then have decisions as to which ones might be better with heifers, etc. Etc.

I mean, it's a tool that I even done it now where if we go and carve a cow or something, we'll say well what's the bull's tag number? Oh, he's just over in this shed here. And you can get if you're in somewhere with phone signal, which in Northumberland isn't always the case, but if you are, then you can actually just write a tag number onto your phone there and then into the Angus website or what have you and come up with these figures, say, well, listen, no wonder we're having to carve cows is -5 or it's quite a powerful thing while the farmers there having just paid for a visit to carve a cow, that these things are not perfect, but they are the best guide there is.

Right. There we go. Yeah, so breeding for, oh, that's a corkscrew penis, by the way, that's a, a farmer who decided not to check his bull, and then, that year only got 5 out of 30 cows.

Not that corks through in electroejaculation means every time that they'll cork through naturally, but it's certainly a, a warning sign that need to be kept an eye on. So the breeding period, I think in terms of length, 6 weeks is fine for heifers. You'll not get them all in calf in 6 weeks, but really you get a virtuous cycle and that Heifer shouldn't really have too many excuses.

We'll talk about HAF selection later. Why she doesn't get in calf and if she has more than 2 attempts, then, . Then, you know, she's not a great breeder and her daughters might not be great breeders, and so we've had farms that have made real progress only bulling the heifers for 6 weeks.

And in time, the fertility of their herd improves because of that. But you'll need to put a few more heifers to the bull than you, than you'll actually need, . The other great thing about that is the first carvers generally the hardest to get back in calf, and so all those heifers are carving near the start of carving, so they've got more time to get your first carvers back in calf.

So much so that in the US, the majority of heifers are actually synchronised and AI, and that's so that they can know that 2/3 of their. Heifers are in calf on day one of boom, which would never happen, natural service, . And that isn't for, you know, being able to choose balls from all over the world sort of reasons, it's purely just to get them in calf early doors.

Which obviously lifts the weaning weights and stuff as well. The timing, that's chat through your farmers with that when they're selling calves, there's not much point, I mean calving in January if you're a fattener and you end up having to keep calves and cows inside for the next 3 or 4 months when they're much more prone to scour and pneumonia and coxy and everything like that, . I think it's Always quite a good thing to carve and kick them out to grass, so hence, the calving in March and April's a good idea.

Clearly if your market is calf sales in the autumn, they need, you need to do that earlier to get them big enough for that. But, but think about that and challenge them and get your farmers to wonder why they're doing things. Full rotation's always good, the pre-breeding exam is best there is, but it's absolutely not perfect, .

And you still need to keep an eye on these bulls, whatever, you know, kind of best team can in the world, but clearly if they can't get it into the cows either because they don't want to or they're not able to, it's not gonna do much good. And, the nutrition and, is, is obviously we've talked about that. I think if you can swap balls around that helps avoid problems.

It's not always possible in terms of being related to daughters and things like that, but if you've got a terminal side ball that you can then sweep around with, that could work quite well. So, have a selection. Age is important.

It's been shown that the single most, The decision that you can change on your farm to make it more likely that you have profitable beef enterprise is carve your heifers at 2. That's the Irish who gonna work on that. There are some farms that for whatever reason can't carve their heifers at 2, but it is most efficient to do that.

You can carve at 2.5 if you've got spring and autumn calving herd, and I think that's OK, but I think 3 is generally too long unless you've got large area of hill land that you're paying very low rent on that you can sort of chuck heifers away on. If you're carving them at 2, they need to be separately managed, till they carve the second time.

Because otherwise you'll end up with stunted little things that don't get back in half. Cows will bully them out to the best of the feed. Their size, for calming at 2, talk about 2/3 of bulling, 2/3 of the cow weight at bulling.

Now, and classically people talk about 400 kg for a 600 kg cow. See there'd be very, very few 600 kg cows in the country. I always think it'd be much more like 700, 750, with a surprising number of beef cows knocking on for a tonne.

So obviously that means that. The bullying weight has to go up, essentially as well, which actually isn't too hard to do. I think a lot of farms are knocking on for 300 kg for their calves.

In the in the autumn time, sort of November, and they've got to get them up to 450 by the following June. That's quite a long time to get 150, you know, it's it's more than 150 days. It's any sort of 0.7.8.

It's not absolutely flying, especially when hopefully the last two months they are doing over 1 kg a day on spring grass. Temperance is important while we're doing the pelvic measuring or bolusing BVD vaccine, it's a great time to assess the temperance, and if they're thrashing around like idiots, just, just send them into the fattening pen. There's no calf worth getting injured for.

There's less and less labour and pretty much, zero tolerance on that. Disease status obviously needs to be in line with the rest of your herd. If you're buying things in, you'll need to do a lot more finding air testing, to think about, and I guess obviously top of the list for farmers in England if they're buying in Wales is things like TB as well as PIs and things.

Pelvic size, do pelvic measuring. The biggest reason why calving difficulties is the size of the cars, the second biggest reason is the size of the pelvic. Inlet, so by measuring those heifers before they go to the ball, you can weed out some of those, a very small number that have two smaller pelvises.

And it's also a good time at the same time you can do reproductive track scoring. And if they've not hit enough puberty, they're not cycling hard enough, not put them into the AI programme because you'll get poor results, etc. Etc.

And you just, and it's surprising how many times actually Heifers by mistake, managed to get in calf when you're doing the pelvic measuring, and, and the farmer remembers that, oh yes, the bull did get out a few months ago and so, we'll talk about maternal EBVs, you know, milk figures, calving his daughters and stuff like. Another point of influence in in the year is management of weaning, which is a whole topic in itself, really, and talk through with your farmers, all of these things, really, . Why they're doing and what and how and when, and you know, particularly I think we possibly underestimate the nutritional change that these calves go, suckle calves are going from a grass and milk.

Pretty high protein to a, to a silage and a bit of 16% cake or whatever, and, you know, that they're a real step change in the protein. And found that that weaning check can be reduced markedly by feeding some good quality protein the first few weeks after weaning. A lot of the ration programmes.

For 300 kg growing cattle are based on dairy cross things that have been weaned at 2 months and obviously their rooms are absolutely well set up for an overall ration just to be 14% protein or so. I think for 300 kg pre-weaned calf, they actually need more protein than that when they are weaned because their, their rumen's not, well, they're not full ruminants, you know, they've been used to getting that protein. This is in America a fence line weaning, which is.

Quite common over there and it's still in touch and you know that is a good fence, but it's the, the calves are grazing there, the cows, some of the cows are looking, but they're not all just lined up at the fence balling each other, . Basically getting the farmers to think about not just putting calves in one shed, the cows in another, and they're both roaring their heads off a week. We do, it's worth looking at the.

Parasite challenge and how to sort that out and we do shed audits. It's amazing how many modern sheds aren't actually that fit for purpose, especially in terms of the ventilation, the exit, of, of air, and if you can't get enough air out, you're certainly not going to get enough in, and different pneumonia protocols if needed, . Yeah, so, so that, that's, that's another key thing to be talking about in the back end.

In the spring calving herd. So In terms of how EBVs are created, going back to the genetics now, it's all done on production data, these animals, young animals are weighed at 200 days or 400 days of back fat scanned to check their, how much fat and how much muscle they've got. This is doing feed efficiency trials in the US, which is, I think going to become much more important, .

Over here and then they mix that production data with the pedigree data and you get an estimated breeding value and there's a massive computer that does the best linear analysis and it allows to compare between flocks. You can't compare between or herds rather, you can't compare in this country between breeds, but you can within the breed, so you know that what you're buying is, where he stands in the breed. The difficulty is that these are young animals that are being bought, generally sort of 1518, 20 months, and they're .

Going to be Relatively low accuracies for the 30% sort of mark. The 40% at best, but that's still the best there is and these EVVs are not perfect, but they're better than just going on look slow for the work. Either that, you know, just looking at him, you can't really tell how good a carver he's going to be or his daughters are going to be or how much milk.

So we'll see how these EBVs are represented. So just that ball, I'm quite a visual person. I quite like these graphs, and in essence on the left is bad and on the right is good, and this is a classic sort of British breeding in that, quite hard to carve but grows like a stick, and longer gestation, it has gestation length I think has a massive impact on.

Suckler profitability with some of these short gestation natives and stabilisers and things. Actually sort of just over 280 days and some continentals being nearer 300, and that 20 day is really, you know, that's nearly 3 weeks difference that the short gestation has to get her uterus prepared to take another calf, and I think that's one of the reasons that fertility has improved on farms that have been looking at. Gestation length and obviously the shorter the gestation, generally you get a a a lighter calf, not absolutely but.

Yeah, so, so that's, that's how it's set for it. They sell them in the catalogues like that, but they're all online like that. So if you just type the tag number and you'll get that.

This is how they're often in the catalogues and you can see here this is an older bull. I just lifted this off the Angus website. And so his accuracy figures, the second row across underneath him and white there are really quite high.

A young bull in a catalogue will never be that high, but that's because this bull here has got quite a lot of offspring at this point, so the accuracy is really quite high. And you can see there compared to the average ball in that ball in 2012, he's got calving he's direct, it's absolutely appalling minus 12.7, but he's got a very very high eye muscle, and high growth rates.

So that's, that actual ball has gave a lot of work to me in the past because he sold to 250 and . He his offspring all were equally bad at carvers, and people buy Angus is not looking at this sort of thing and then be surprised that they ended up with dystopia problems. In front of the catalogues to see where those figures fit in the breed thing, if we go back to carving direct, the first column there, you can see this is short horns, but it doesn't matter which are, if it's -12, you can see you right down at the bottom there, .

Yes, the percentile balances are important. And they, they do just measure, excuse me, the genetic potential of these bulls, and, . And you can use them to to improve what you, if you're having difficulty getting your cattle fat enough before they hit the 400 kgs dead weight, then your next bull you might want to go for a much more increased fat.

Or if you're finding your heifers are a bit dry, then you might be looking for a bull of milk. And it'll probably all be superseded by genomics, but in the beef side we're way behind the dairy because there's so many different diversity of breeds and because of that, it makes progress much slower. But even genomics are built on a bedrock of EBVs and data.

I am getting on, right, so can I talk about the KPIs here. The, the key ones I think are. The percentage calving the first three weeks and that's, that's actually not the 1st 3 weeks from when the first calf is born, it's from when they're due, you know, 283 for natives or 287s for continentals, because quite often you'll get a set of twins early or cow might have a calf out a week premature or what have you, and that skews the whole result.

So it's when it's when they're due. And the other thing is number of the in calf scanning time and the average weaning weight. You can, you can adjust to 200 days of weaning weight.

The great thing about just straight average weaning weight is you're getting that actually non-adjusted 200 days. That actually gives you an indication of fertility as well as growth rates, because the more tight the pattern, the more calves you got at the beginning, that will lift your average weaning weight. If it's 200 days adjusted, then you can have a really long calving interval and still have reasonably good weaning weights, but actually it just adds loads of extra logistical nightmares at any one point in time, you don't have as much beef there to sit down.

So length of calving period obviously important. Other KPIs are, more for finishers and fatteners. Daily live weight gain.

Which obviously is important and it comes back to actually measuring your output again. Hit animals percentage hitting target specs or carcass confirmation fat class, comes back to genetics and how well you feed them in terms of when you get them away. There can be difficulties sometimes these days with queues at the abattoirs and that you get your cattle ready and then they don't take them for 3 weeks or a month and they go too fat.

But it's worth looking at these sorts of things and seeing how how the farmers are doing. The conversion rate right at the bottom, I think that is a, is going to become very much more important. Unless you've got those growa bins, realistically, your only way of accessing that is by buying bulls that are beaten to a growa bin where they measure actually the amount of food the bulls are eating individually and correlate that with how much they're growing and how much back fat they've got, and some bulls will actually eat half the amount of food that others will still grow at the same rate, which obviously makes them miles more efficient because.

Go back to the first one of the first slides feed and forage is one of the biggest costs, so. Financials obviously is what actually it's all about to a certain extent, and cost per kilo of beef produced is probably the headline figure, . Finding out how many kilos of beef producers, obviously the first step in that, and then you can go to cost per head per day.

This is probably, you know, maybe 2nd and 3rd visit to the farmers really, but, worth looking at farm bench and looking through and getting familiar with these things. The audit, Professor David Barrett down in Bristol's been doing a fair bit of work on this, looking at antibiotic audits and standard cow size and stuff, and, that will definitely come in and there's a bit of pressure from retailers that they want an antibiotic sort of trail and audit, . And so that's, and that feeds then into instances of, scour or pneumonia, sort of halfway down there, which I think really the two biggest, users of antibiotics really.

Obviously, percentage mortality, is important and actually culling rate. So if you're. If you've only got the bull out for 4 weeks, but you, you've got a massively high replacement rate, you know, you can.

Alter all these figures, it's why you have to look at them in the round, and that you'll have very high band rate and a high replacement rate, and so. Culling couldn't be, can actually be quite an important one, especially it's sort of voluntary culls or involuntary culls, and it may not mean by involuntary, it's to the ball and they don't get in calf, or they start dying of the ownies and get rid of them before they die, as opposed to she's not weaning very good calves for a couple of seasons, let's get rid of her. Right.

So just in summary, These show great enthusiasm for your beef farms when if you're on the TB testing to come through, give them a condition score, talk about what vaccines and stuff, what's his breeding strategy, what he's going for, and actually, you know, show interest in, in their, their enterprises, . And get involved in it in each part of it really, you know, the subtler side, the fattening part, etc. And, the more you do, the more the trust will build up and you'll be a partnership between you and helping drive the farm forward.

If you're au fait with the KPIs and benchmarks, then that makes a real difference and you're then able to focus your health plan. Who actually make a difference to his production. Be proactive, actually go out there and .

If you talked about a health plan, see the testing the bus, phone them up in May, say, right, when am I coming out to see the test balls? Should I come out tomorrow or what have you? As far as a busy people, I think about silage, clipping hogs, that sort of thing.

It's, it's amazing how that gets lost off, but if you go chasing that work, it will happen and they'll reap the rewards and you'll reap the rewards. And use previous years things to, to sell, and your services to make the difference to their farm. And once you've done that, don't just think it will happen automatically each year, you still have to make your list.

Phone round and getting booked in. I think it's important to challenge farms to do better. There's normally lots of ways to .

You know, Actually, instead of just in the day to day hurly-burly, actually take a step back and say, well, why are you doing this? And do you think this could be done better? And that sort of that time for an hour or two a year can be quite good sort of time to actually farmers to chat through their strategy of what they're doing.

Right, so the last slide there is future webinars from Sarah, which is hopefully self. Good. Great.

Thanks very much and if there's any questions, yeah, fire away. Thank you very much, Joe. That was really, really interesting, and also a very practical presentation for us all.

So it's obviously clearly the veterinary management of suckler herd is very, very important. You've given us some great pointers there. Before we do go.

Questions, could I just ask everyone who's watched just to spare 30 seconds to complete the feedback survey that should have popped up, in a new tab in your browser. Depending on which device you're using to watch the webinar, the survey doesn't always present itself. So if that's the case for you, just email, the, the webinar with your, the webinar vet with your feedback, which is the email is office at the webinarvet.com.

If you're listening to recording of this webinar, you can also add comments on the website underneath the recording or again email the webinar vet office. So you've got some questions. Coming in, please keep them coming in.

Thanks all for your patience as well with all the technical difficulties that we have. So I'm just gonna carry on with the first question here for Joe. You mentioned about being proactive on your last slide.

Obviously you're in a very proactive practise with a lot of proactive, farmers. But what advice would you have for, for vets that want to be more proactive, have maybe tried to be more proactive with their clients, but are just struggling to get them to engage? So I think it's, it's, if you can get on farm, and for some areas of England, I think you're on farm reasonably often with, with routine TV testing every 6 months or what have you.

And so. That is a really big in in that while you're there on the farm, it's a lot easier to get to do things, so we're already coming through. Let's actually take some blood to find out what the mineral status is.

Let's get your BVD free accredited status because those calves are going off the market. We've got to do a pre-movement test. Let's just take the blood off a few.

And that's the sort of thing. I think if they, if they're not really having to pay that much extra for the visit and you're there on the farm anyway. And I think that can be quite a good in, .

And you know, the more you can do that and then demonstrate the return on that, that's sometimes what we're not so good at veterinary side of things is showing that return and. You know, classically you, you've changed something on the farm and the PD rate goes up the next year and the farmer will say, oh well, we had a better summer, didn't we, you know, the grass grew better and you've got to remind him that actually he complained about that IVR vaccine price that you've stuck into protocol. 18 months previously and and maybe that's actually had a bit more to do with it than just the better year and, and sort of try and demonstrate that when you're going through the health plan and say, you know, this is, we did this last year, this is, this is the outcome and that's why it's so important to measure those things in terms of the instance of pneumonia, you know, to put things in place to reduce that, etc.

Etc. And if you start making progress like it does, the ball will start rolling. And you know, you do one thing right, then you, you'll get trusted and you get to do more.

But yeah, it is, it's difficult if you're just phoning people and just keep getting no, keep getting no, but you just got to keep knocking on the door. As I say, I think it's probably easiest first time around when you're already on the farm, you know, if you're there carving a cow. Get the Bulls EPV.

Get the cows, if it's pedigree cows, you'll be able to get her EVVs. Look at the ration, look at the nutrition, what's the body condition of all the rest of the cows, and you can, it's just any job you do, you should be thinking about the whole herd. And, and so it's there, you know, Dee Horning, why is he buying pole bulls, etc.

Etc. You know, have those discussions. Brilliant, so you use every opportunity on farm to try and drive, drive those discussions.

Yeah, it's nearly, I, I would say I hardly ever go onto a farm and just do one job. There's nearly always more to do. Yeah, I mean, I, I, I'll, I don't think I've ever done a TB test and not, and only just done a TV test.

So utilise, utilise those, those options when you have that time you have on farm and try to think about what other discussions you can drive. Here's, here's another question, that we've had in from Mark. How well is utilised as AI in spring block carving, suckler herds?

Yeah, that's a really interesting one, probably not enough in the UK, but I think it's going to become more important for the reason, you know, in terms of . Getting those 2/3 of them in calf on day one of bulling, which actually wants to start measuring the calf weaning weight, is worth a lot of money to them, as well as the fact for smaller herds, it's great, you're not having to buy new bulls every, If you've got 250 cows, you can rotate your bulls a bit easier and things, but, if you've got a small herd, that's more difficult. So you're not having to change bulls as often, and you can access, you know, great genetics.

So, yeah, we have a sync programme that, It's just 3 times through the stocks and that's removed a lot of resistance to doing the synchronisation. I think for suckler herds it has to be sync because trying to, you know, spot them and stuff. As a practise we've got AI, we've invested in an AI tank, and Jenny and Jack have gone on a course and stuff, and they, so we do the whole process.

We do the synchronising and the AIing helping them choose the semen. For the particular jobs and because we're in charge of that whole thing, then we make sure that they've had the bonus in time, they've had the BVD vaccine and the electro vaccine, they're in the, they're on the right ration, and I think because of that, Jack's been getting such good results. So yeah, just firing in with a bit of semen without actually looking at whether these heifers are already cycling and, and such like, you know, that's really important.

But it's for providing much more an all round, all round service there. I've got some questions here in terms of the genetics advice that you give. So on the subject of EBVs how would you suggest?

Selecting the right bull breed when the farmer has a different breed or crossbred cows and sort of along similar lines, how involved do you get in a genetics advice, and either through bull EBVs or a change in breed to breed more efficient cows. So what sort of role do you play and how do you, what do you do within that role in terms of genetics advice? Yeah, yeah, pretty, pretty integral to that role, really, and that, we'll have everything from, you know, farmers bringing bull catalogues in before the sale and we go through, you know, generally have a tick thing and you can normally cross off at least half the bulls we've got terrible calving value, and then depending on what he wants, whether he, as I say, he's wanting to put more milk into the cows or more easy finishing or what have you, .

That is, in terms of breeds, there's as much variation, I think within breeds as between breeds, and I think you've, but you've got to look at other things as well, like the Angus premium, for instance, which, is, it's not at the moment, but it's often worth about 10% in terms of if beef is trading at 350 kg dead weight, then Angus premium might be 30, 35%. How have you got to trade off that that things like stabilisers, composite cows, four-way composite are probably, when the USDA looked at that, they're 23% more efficient over their lifetime because they're crossbred rather than pure bred in terms of fertility, longevity, disease resistance. And so those are the sorts of discussions to be having with farmers, but a lot depends on what the farmer actually wants, what's his goal and outcome, because, It's no good just choosing, you know, hit it, he's got to think about where he wants to be in 5 years and 10 years, and, and you make those decisions on the genetics to get him there.

You know, maybe he doesn't want to run around after mental calves anymore, so let's look at some, getting some more docility in or, or what have you, you know, so it's, yeah, absolutely, I would say the vet is integral to the breeding and buying new genetics. That's, yeah, that's really, there's not really anywhere else you can go for all that information, and we often see the outcomes quite clearly, you know, 2 in the morning. Which is the outcome we don't want, you know, he's he's lost money at that.

We're grumpy for the rest of the day. You know, it, yeah, and, and it can be avoided. Largely, you know, clearly there's obviously there's always gonna be.

Yeah. So just on the subject of avoiding that, we're not gonna be able to get through all the questions tonight, before we finish in a couple of minutes, but what we will do is we will forward those on to Joe, to see whether he can, he, he's happy to answer them, and then we'll, we'll email them out. But 11 quick question which follows on from the last question, your last comment.

When preparing the cow for the ball, what, what's the ideal body condition score for the cow when she goes to the ball? I mean, I, I think they want to be sort of condition score 3, really, almost as important is, is whether they're going up, rising or decreasing, and, that's possibly more, you know, as long as they're at mid-range, . Clearly you don't want them too fat or too thin, but the important thing is it's not decreasing, so particularly problem for autumn calving herds that are, you know, trying to build as the grass is getting worse, or they're starting to supplement with silage, which might be pretty moderate quality silage.

Or here with droughts, we're on the fairly east, east coast, it can get a bit droughty. So the sort of the plane of nutrition is, is. As important I would say than the condition, but really, yeah, ideally you want to be 3, 3.5, probably.

OK, and one last question just to just to finish up. When would you ideally see and test the bus in relation to when turning them out with the cows? That's a, that's a really good question.

So often around about 2 months, 6 weeks beforehand, if you go too early, then the, the picture can change too much, and obviously if you go too late, if, if you're not getting the right result, there's no time to do anything about it. So. Two couple of months before is a sort of reasonable time in that if it gives the ball a chance to pull himself round, if you go, if you go and see a test and the ball is actually just being chucked a bit of hay and he's really lean and you know, conditions for 1.5 to 2 and his semen is pretty poor, you've got a chance, put him on better feed, for a month.

Give him a bit of exercise and recheck him, and you've got the chance to get his semen up and he's gonna be up and at them, whereas if you go two weeks beforehand. That, then, you know, the farmer's got nowhere to run to and if he, if he is actually corkscrewing or what have you, you don't have time to do a test mating beforehand and then the farmer doesn't have time to get another bull, you know, if he is a knacker job, so. Yeah, I think, I think a couple of months.

OK, so be, be prepared for, for what might go wrong and have a plan in place in case it, in case, yeah, absolutely, if you go the week before and you know, 1 in 4 bus is sub-fertile, it it's just not. It's not enough time to sort out anything. Brilliant.

Thank you very much for those really comprehensive answers. So we're gonna bring that to a close now. Apologies.

I know that we haven't got to all of your questions, but we will forward those on to Joe, and then circulate the answers to those. So I just want to thank you, Joe, again, for your presentation, really useful practical advice there, and also to everyone that's attended tonight's live webinar and thank you once again. Again, for putting up with our few technical problems.

We, as you can see from this slide, we've got a really exciting programme of webinars, over the coming months. We've got one every fortnight, and our next webinar is in 2 weeks' time on Tuesday, the 28th of April, when we have Ian Richards, from Lake Specs Consultancy joining us to discuss the importance of conservation, medicine and farm practise and also looking at some of his liver fluke work. So we really look forward to you joining us then, but in the meantime, please take care and stay safe and good night.