Hello, everyone. My name is Victor Cabrera. I'm a professor and extension dairy specialist in farm management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences.
And today I would like to share with you . Work that we have done in the area of economic evaluation and the title of this presentation is Economic Markers for Dairy Cattle Reproductive Performance. And hopefully what I'm going to share with you today is going to be a practical application in the decision making of dairy farms.
So let's start with how we measure reproductive performance. I know there are so many ways to Assess what is the level of reproductive performance on farms. And probably you have heard about days open and we all know that the longer the day open, the lower the reproductive performance, the shorter the period of days open in general on an average on a third would be an indication of better reproductive performance, and that's OK.
The same as, for example, other people will use. The number of pregnancies or the percentage of pregnant cows at 150 days postpartum, that's also a measure, but I can tell you right now that all the measures are biassed some way or another. And actually, if you allow me to discuss briefly about the days open that we indicated and it's heavily used in the industry.
It has a number of problems. Like, for example, days open early in lactation, it is very different than days open later in lactation. Days open in first lactation cows may be a much less costly than days open in later lactation, for example.
And then, however, we use days open in general and we put one value to all days open, which in my opinion, is not the right way to measure reproductive performance. Now, hopefully, many of you have heard about 21 day pregnancy rate. I do believe it is the measure that has been more widely adopted in the dairy industry.
And maybe it's the best we have at hand. I still believe it has some bias and we should use with care. Nonetheless, I think it's, Something that we could use to somehow compare different farms.
The 21 day pregnancy rate, as it says here in the slide, basically measure the number of eligible cows that become pregnant in every 21 day period. And as in the case of these open. Actually, it doesn't ponder if those 21 day periods are early lactation or late lactation, first lactation, later lactation.
So, from that point of view, there is some bias, obviously. However, if it's well used, it could be an important and probably the most important measurement of reproductive performance. I would like to comment on two things that are very important when we are talking about 21 day pregnancy rate.
And since 21 day pregnancy rate is heavily dependent on the eligible cows, and in the figure here also you can see in blue represented the eligible cows, which means those animals that are ready to be bred, OK. But the number or proportion of those animals in 21 day in, in as eligible cows. Depends on when is our voluntary waiting period, meaning when we will start breeding the cows after calving.
And until when we're going to be Breeding those cows. So what's called the do not breed criteria. Some farmers will say, I don't breed cows after 250 days post calving or after 300 days post calving.
Therefore, those two indicators will determine what are the eligible cows within. We measure the eligible costs. And from those, we will have a proportion of animals that will be inseminated, which means the service rate, and from those, depending on the service rate, we will have a number of inseminated cows and the conception rate of those inseminated cows will give us the pregnant cows at the end.
It will use and the way I want to think about this is we should, for example, say not only 21 day pregnancy rate, but 21 day pregnancy rate with a voluntary waiting period of 50 or 60 days and we do not breed criteria of 250 days, for example. That would be a much better way if we want to compare different farms. Saying all that, I think it's important to introduce a new concept.
The one I think we should better measure reproductive performance. And what I propose here is to use actually. The full economic value of a reproductive programme.
To measure its efficiency. So, if you allow me to, to explain in this figure here that comes from one of our recent papers, just to illustrate, you can see this what we call survival curves. Probably you have seen this before, and basically what they are measuring is the proportion of animals becoming pregnant as they move towards.
Their lactation. So time in days after calving or days after postpartum after calving. And in this case, let's assume these are cows in the, in the first lactation, proportion of first lactation cows not pregnant in the way Y axis.
And on the X axis, as I said before, is the proportion of animals at the the days post caving. The different colours in the, in the lines indicate different reproductive programmes. C1 to C4.
And right here, we, we, we are not looking for explain what each one of these reproductive programmes are, but just to let you know. Or that some of those are more intensive with the use of synchronisation programmes, what we call the time AI programmes, and some are more intense with the use of heat detection. And somehow you can tell that by looking at the, at the, at the curves.
Like, for example, the purple curve here I'm trying to highlight, you can tell at least at the very beginning, it's heavy on time AI because you can see a great proportion of animals becoming pregnant at one point in time. That's the time AI. And then you can see, for example, the red curve here that at least at the beginning trust a lot on the heat detection because cows are becoming pregnant consistently after certain days, probably the days of voluntary waiting period, OK?
Good. So this is available in any farm and software of management that will tell you the proportion of animals getting pregnant. And along this, probably it will give you a pregnancy rate.
Let's assume, and actually this comes from that research I was mentioning, the red curve indicates 36.7% of pregnancy rate. But in my opinion, it will be more important than indicating that 36.7%, indicating what's the value we're having at every point indeed.
Every single day we're having changes in the population, and those changes indicate different returns and costs. So we can calculate a net return at every point in time and make a balance. Whatever that balance is, it's a number here will be our baseline and then we can compare that with another reproductive programme.
And like for example, we are comparing here the red one that we said. Is 36.7% of pregnancy rate, and we're comparing with the green one that actually has higher pregnancy rate calculated as we mentioned in the previous slide, 37.5%.
A little slighter, better reproductive. And because of that, the net returns in different points in time will be different as well. And if we add all those values, it happens and actually this is data on this research, even though The green curve here has higher pregnancy rate.
You could have a lower economic value. In this case, for example, $2 less perc per year. OK.
It's not a huge amount, but this for illustration and demonstration purposes that not always higher reproductive programme, for example, reproductive pregnancy rate will give you the highest value. And I think a better way to measure this is actually the speed at which the cows are getting pregnant and how that translates. I think the important thing here is how this translates to dollar values.
That's what it matters at the end in the farm. And I will show you later in the presentation some tools that will allow you to do this kind of analysis for your specific farm system. The other thing I want to point out to you, also based in some research we did a few years back, is the fact that different reproductive programmes will have different values.
Or relative values according to the productivity of the herd. OK. Let me Illustrate this.
If for a moment we take a look here to the time II programme, this 17% time II means 100% time II. So in this reproductive programme, we are not doing any heat detection. Everything is As synchronisation and the pregnancy rate is 17%.
And when We are having a herd that has average production. These 17% ranks, if you see on the left here, in the middle. It's not the top, it's not the bottom, it's at the middle as Represented by the pregnancy rate.
17% is about the middle. We have the lowest with 14% pregnancy rate and the highest with 20% pregnancy rate. So, what I'm saying to, to emphasise is when we are at the average production level, which is normally at the level we do a lot of research, we will likely follow what it normally Looks like or expected, the pregnancy rate would represent the ranking of economic value.
The 14% would be, would be at the lowest point, the 20% at the highest level, and the 17% at the middle. However, I think the important point in this graph is the fact that if the productivity of the hair is lower or it's higher, this ranking can change drastically. For example, with the 17% time AI, when we have a lower productivity on the herd, it does happen that that reproductive programme is the lowest ranking.
And when the productivity is the highest, the 17% programme becomes the top second highest reproductive programme from the standpoint of view of the economics. And I think this is very important to highlight because I do think there is an interaction between productivity of the herd and determining the best reproductive programme for every farm. And we, we cannot see this if we look at the data or the research that is applied to in general to all the farms.
We need to do this analysis farm by farm according to the lactation purposes of each farm according to the economic factors and the market conditions in every situation. The other point that I think it's important to highlight. Is the fact that consistently, you can see here 6 different published research, 7 indeed, that indicate that as we increase the 21 day pregnancy rate, in this case, for example, is moving from 10% all the way to 35% pregnancy rate.
As we move and increase the pregnancy rate, you can clearly see, regardless of the research. That The value, the profit is increasing. Right?
So I think that's very clear with small exceptions. In general, as we improve pregnancy rate, we will improve the gain or profitability, the economic value of the reproductive programmes. So I think that's very important to keep in mind.
The best we can have the reproductive programme, the most money we will make. However, That this graph is also indicating is that This follows what's called the diminishing law of lower returns. That means that as we increase, every time we keep increasing, the gain will be lower and lower.
And actually, as in this top line indicates, at some point likely. About 30, 35%, we are reaching a plateau, meaning that there may be a detrimental effect if the pregnancy rate is too high, right? According to all the other research, there seems to be still room for improvement to 40 or even beyond 40% pregnancy rate.
But I can tell you that at some point, It will not justify keep investing on having even greater reproductive programme because there are some Trade-offs with that. Like, for example, the case that as we have more reproductive performance, we will have more and more population of dry cows on the herd, which are not producing at any point in time. So if we do like a a cat at one point in time, there will be more proportion of dry cows that are not producing at that specific time.
And therefore that will decrease the average production of the hair, for example, right? So something to keep in mind, I would just conclude this slide saying that I think there is still huge room to keep improving reproductive performance, but keep in mind that the investment for the marginal gains needs to be carefully considered. And at some point, getting to high reproductive programme may not be worthwhile unless that's the other thing we need to mention here, unless we will combine that improved reproductive performance with other strategies like for example, using Bymen.
Or for example, using genomic tests to select the animals, we're gonna talk that a little more later in the presentation. OK. So why there is such an increased economic value and there are many and many factors, OK.
For example, one, the second one I'm, I'm pointing out here is very evident or logical, right? When we have the cows being bred on time and they are calving in a good interbreed inter lactation interval. So cows normally will be in the most efficient part of their productive life and be, be more productive, having more feed efficiency, right?
But one thing probably we don't talk or discuss much is the fact that over time, if we have a good reproductive programme, the hurt demographics. Statistics will improve. So we'll have the right proportion of first lactation cows, later lactation cows, we will have the right proportion of animals in mid lactation, in the peak of lactation, etc.
Etc. Right? That's a struggle in some farms that have lower reproductive performance.
We will also produce more on-farm replacements, and they have a value, right? Whether we raise on farm or whether we sell them outside or whether we use custom facilities to raise them, it's like a separate enterprise. Those replacements have a value because I'm producing them.
And now with this new wave of using beef simmen, for example, it could, it could bring up additional, quite a bit additional income for the farm. Now, the other two things I, I wanna, I wanna carefully mention, less mortality and less cost of replacements are important. And also I think as a couple of Factors that are not.
Very well considered when we talk about reproductive performance. OK. We are, we are very, very keen on recognise that if, if we have better reproductive performance, we will have less calling or replacements because of reproductive failure, right?
Less cows will reach the point in which they don't get pregnant and we will need to replace them because it's too late for them to get pregnant. OK, if we have a good reproductive performance, that's clear. What is less clear is the fact that having that and having the optimal health demographics will have a decrease.
Natural cul and mortality of the animals because we will have the cows in the right place in the, in the lactation, during the lactation, not too late in lactation, for example, that normally implies higher replacement for many reasons. That are beyond reproductive. And the other thing, I want to mention, the increased economic value could be not always because the relative costs of reproduction will decrease.
And this will depend on how much we invest and how much benefit we bring with that investment. So sometimes, The benefits will be higher than the investment. Some of the time may not be.
And in order to know that, actually, we will need to use some tools that I'm gonna make you aware later on in the pre presentation. And the last thing I want to mention here, and we're gonna be able to discuss as well is when we have better reproductive performance, it opens up a number of additional possibilities on the farm. Like I mentioned, use of bit semen, genomic test, we can do a greater selective cooling on our adult hair.
We have more replacements coming in. We can select better our adult her. We can do a number of things because we have better reproductive performance.
We can, the other thing we can do actually is have a goal of improve our genetic progress on the herd. And as you know, that depends heavily on our reproductive performance. So let's quickly discuss about some of the important factors that increase the profitability at increasing the 21 day pregnancy rate or the pregnancy or the reproductive performance.
It is very clear. I mean, and this comes from from some research we did and, and this is confirmed in many other publications. As we increase the 21 day pregnancy rate, we will increase the income or feed costs.
And, and why I, I want to mention income or feed cost because this, this is a margin already, right? We're increasing the milk, but also that increase. The need for feed to produce that additional milk.
But overall, our feed efficiency will be increased and therefore, that will bring additional net return. And for example, here in this specific research increasing from 10 to 25%. I meant $20 per cup per year of additional.
Net return just because of the income overfe cost. This will change. It will depend on the lactation curves, how, for example, how much fast they decline, how fast they reach the peak, etc.
It will be different if it is a first lactation or later lactation cow, but these are numbers in general and in general, we will expect our income morphic cost to be increased as we increase the 21 day pregnancy rate. In a similar fashion, as we increase the pregnancy rate, it's very logical as as well, and we have ways to quantify specifically how much more calves, males and females will be produced. Whether we use just conventional semen or maybe sex semen that will have a proportion of females of 90%, for example.
It depends, but The bottom line is, as we increase the 21 day pregnancy rate, our value of having more calves will increase. And that's, that's very logic. Whether we use those calves for our own replacement or for selling to the market, it's, it's a different deal, but the bottom line is that we will be creating more value by creating more replacements.
How about replacement costs? I mentioned this already before a little bit in the fact that This data comes, for example, from research from a different lab from Albert Debris in, in Florida. And here indicates, and this comes from millions and millions of records from the, the CDCB, which is the Council of Dairy Cattle Breeding in the US, and what it shows is the risk of culling of cows, for any reason beyond reproductive failure.
And you can see here early lactation, and by the way, each one of these curves represents different lactations. Early lactation, you see a little spike of calling risk. Because of the metabolic problems, we all know after calving, cows will be affected about that.
It's very difficult to, to avoid that if you want to have new lactations, right? So that's a period that naturally will happen. It depends on the lactation.
If we have a better Previous lactation, we will try, we could reduce this, OK? But in general, this is assumed something that will need to happen no matter what. But the important thing is after that period, there will be a good period in which the risk will be relatively low for a period of time.
And so we need to take advantage to put our cows using reproductive performance in this part, most of our cows, so they have less cooling risk. Because when they start at 250 days or even better or worse at 300 days or later, you see, the current risk will increase greatly. So, in general, To simplify And this is like the later the cows reach in the lactation because they are not getting pregnant.
In time, They will have a much higher risk of being caught for any reason beyond reproductive failure. And that has a value, and we can quantify that value in our reproductive performance assessment. Next thing I, I would like to discuss with you that I think it's, it's very important is What is the best option if to use SO detection?
Or time II or a combination of time AI and esto detection. Once again, time II is synchronisation programmes that use hormones to synchronise the reproductive insemination. And SU detection is that the one that uses visual or nowadays, it could be also using activity monitors to detect.
The estrus without the use of hormones, OK? So some programmes may use only time AI, other programmes may only use esto detection. But most indeed, we use a combination of both things.
And this is slide is to show demonstrate what should be the right level of using one versus the other. OK. So let me quickly explain and this is based in different research as you can see in the table here.
In this case, we use, data from time AI, in the first service, . That had a conception rate of different levels as you can see here in the first column, and a conception rate that had in the later service a different conception rate. So the idea in this different papers and research was we are setting up the costs to a time synchronisation programme with this level of first service consumption rate and this level of consumption rate in the later service.
OK. So now the question comes in the second part of this table, and the part that we are highlighting in yellow. And in this case is assuming that we have 60% estrus detection.
This is OS detection or Erus detection conception rate. So The idea here is to test if in this time AI. Reproductive programme, it would be worth it to introduce SO detection with 60% of service rate.
And the conception rate of that 60% service rate was, could be either 25, 30%, or 35%. So for example, in the first case here using the double of sync. Plus 32 off sync for re-synchronizations with 45 conception in the first service and 30% in the later services.
If we Have the opportunity to detect 60% of the cows, and we have 30% of consumption rate. Actually, we will gain $14 by introducing an SO detection service in between the services. However, if we have a different synchronisation programme that has double up sync plus double of sync in the resynchronizations, and in that case, in the later services or re-synchronizations, we have 39% of conception rate.
And we introduced a 30% consumption rate. We will lose $12 per cow per year. So in that case, it's not worthwhile to do an S2 detection because we have very high consumption rate with our time AI.
Last example here just to demonstrate the numbers in the table. If we have presync of sync plus of sync. With 42% 1st service, 30% in the next services, and we tested in this case whether we would have 25, 30 or 35% of conception rate.
And you can see here if the conception rate in the EU detection in between, the recentronization will be 25%. It's not worth it. We will lose $17.
If it is 30%, we will gain $2 and if it is 35%, we will gain $19. OK. Bottom line of this slide is the fact that In most of the cases, if our conception rate of esto detection is similar at least or around the conception rate of the time.
MII resynchronizations, it's worthwhile to consider anSO detection in between and breed the cows that show heat in between the synchronizations. If you expect that your conception rate will be lower, much lower than the time, it may not be worthwhile to consider that. But again, this will depend on the specific farm conditions, and luckily we have the tools that will allow to do that determination in a case by case situation.
Another thing I wanna make you aware in this presentation is the fact of the value of decreasing the interreading interval time. This is very important. Because when we are more effective, effective in our reproductive programme, we can decrease either from 8 to 7 weeks, the interbreeding interval from 7 to 66 to 5, or even we could think 5 to 4 weeks.
From one time AI to the next time II. OK. Why is this important?
Because as you can see here, we calculate how much value that has, and it varies between 36 all the way to $47 per cow per year. That's a huge volume. If you consider cow by cow, even more in large herds, decreasing one week could be very important.
And why we did this analysis specifically we did it to see the possibility to use. A pregnancy test that could be very Early on, like, for example, we have nowadays the, the protein test that could be done. Some companies claim 20 days, 22 days, 26 days, much earlier than doing the ultrasound or the palpation to detect the non-pregnant cows or pregnant cows, right?
So, Once we use this proteins, and nowadays they can be even used in milk. At the milking time. We can save time, and that time has a value.
And therefore, It, it could be used that value to ponder against the potential costs or additional costs of this test and Maybe the lower accuracy of those tests. We all know these new tests in blood or in milk are not 100% accurate. There would be some missing values that are, you can tell they are not definitive pregnant or not pregnant, and there are others that could be false positives or false negatives, and those have a value as well.
In our research in 2013, as you can see here, actually we, we demonstrate that this value would be much higher than the potential lost value by this lower accuracy and the value, the cost of the of the test. So an opportunity here to, to think, to decrease the reading interval. There are ways to do that to.
A tighten the reproductive programme and the value of it. Another thing that's interesting, this is, a little more recent, study we did. With data of US on the left side and European market on the right side.
Alessandro Ricci was spent some time here. He's from Italy and he was very interested actually on, finding out, the value of these high intensive reproductive programmes using synchronisation. Even in European markets that they have a much higher cost of the hormones.
OK. So let me briefly explain what these graphs mean. Basically, they are finding the break even cost.
Of the hormones that will pay off for the increased performance of these reproductive programmes. You can see different curves here that indicate different reproductive programmes with different performance level. OK.
The idea is not discussed in detail. The idea is to show here that What would be the level of value we could afford to pay for the Hormones Even though, they are more they are expensive, they will have an additional value that will bring to the curve. Like for example, here, if we see a moment on the left, the number one.
Means $2.3 per dose of PGF, and $2.6 per dose of GRH.
If that would be the cost. Actually, that at the moment of the analysis, that was the cost in the market. We will have this around $25 of net return by using.
The synchronisation programme, the more aggressive programme compared with the least aggressive programme. But if we wanted to find the breakeven cost, actually, we start increasing the price of both GRH and PGF and you can see here around 3 multiples of the actual price, so $6.9 per PGF and $7.8 per gauge would be the cost that we can afford to pay.
In this case, for this reproductive programme that was presynopsy with automatic alert monitoring systems. We, we can afford that, even that such high price of the hormones and it will pay off by the improved performance. OK.
So you can see in all the cases, this was actually the lowest in all the other reproductive product, we can even pay much more for the hormones. And as I mentioned, this this analysis, Alessandro was interested in the European market. And as we know, GNRH and PGF are much more expensive in the European market, actually at the time of the analysis, 5.1 for PGF and 6.7 for GRH, but also the benefits and the price of milk are different.
Every everything's different, and you can see even in that case. For all the reproductive programmes, all these lines were above the zero, meaning that, there was always a value of using at the current price. And even if we increase the price, Of the hormones, there would be a good possibility to still be adding value to the reproductive programmes that use more intensive hormones and synchronisation programmes.
Additional advantages. I mentioned a little bit about this before. And I think it's important to mention once again and in a little more detail the fact that Every time we do reproductive decisions, indirectly, we are also touching on our genetic progress of the herd.
Right? Because if we use a semen that's the top sire will bring better value to our animals. That's one thing and most of the farmers are doing that and they select different traits to do those kind of selection.
That's great. But here actually in these different curves it's showing different reproductive programmes and the idea is not to discuss what specifically are those reproductive programmes. Some are applied to the heifers and others are to the cows, but in a, in a systematic way for the whole herd.
And basically what this is showing is what is the expected genetic progress we will have by using different reproductive product. And this is beyond using the top side on, on, on the market. This is based on how our population of animals.
Move dynamically across the reproductive protocol. And so you can see here there are clearly some reproductive programmes that will have a higher progress in time than other reproductive programmes and that obviously has a value. And in this case, we are just measuring this value by net merit, which is an aggregate of an index of many, many traits.
Last thing I want to mention in this slide is the blue line, the dash line on top is the sire, and the top sire from the CDCB, the Council of dedicate breeding, and the red one on the bottom is the replacement heifers, also the average on the herd of the US. So we can be in between. Normally herds in the US will be in between, but we want to be much closer as possible to the blue line.
Getting our reproductive, our genetic progress better and our reproductive programme will help on that certainly. Selective breed. I mentioned this as well.
This is practical way how we can do it and we are doing in some of our analysis. We can select animals by genetic merit. Once again, this is an index trait or we can select any trait of the animals, right?
But the thing is, nowadays, the way we do reproductive, Protocols or management strategically in farms is what I call in blanket in groups of animals. So we do the synchronisation programme all the same for all the lactations and early and late lactations. And we don't distinguish much animals.
Today, we are in an era that we have a lot of data on the animals, whether we use automatic milking systems or whether we use different software. We do have a lot of records of animals and give us an opportunity. And in this case, for example, we will have whether we use genomic tests or not, we will have a good indication of the genetic level of each animal.
So we can select animals. We can do this distribution, for example, of our animals. And we can put a line at some point and we can select the cows that will be bred with a specific type of y.
We can do that, and I think that's something we are getting closer and closer and farms, some farms are already doing this, reaching what we would call like a precision reproductive management of farms, right? Once every cow is ready to be bred, we have the option to decide, OK, where is this cow and the genetic me on my herd? Should I use the best semen?
Should I use A conventional semen. In the middle, or should I use a beef simmer? That's another option as well, right?
It's going to bring us additional value and maybe I don't want to have a replacement out of this cow that's probably not on the top of my hair. We do have a tool that allow us actually using the genetic index and many other variables to Calculate the value of every single cow on the herd, OK. So, Let me just briefly go back to the previous slide.
If this is not an option. Or in our opinion, a better option could be to combine these data of the genetic merit or any genetic value or estimates we will have of the animals together with Economic value of a cow, we have a tool that will allow us to calculate for every single animal on the herd what is its economic value for the herd from now into the future, what I expect from each cow on the herd, and based on that, I can do a much better decision to which cows breed with which semen. And indeed it even allow us to do decisions like for example, skip a breathing if that's an option.
Because the other part of all this decision making is to find out how many replacements I need. Likely nowadays, we don't want to raise more replacements than what we need at the specific moment, we're having a, a short shortage of replacements, but a couple of years ago, there was a surplus of replacements. But thinking on a farm by farm basis, actually, the safest way to operate is to try to produce the right number of animals to maintain my hair size and therefore that allows me to do if I have a good reproductive programme to select which animals should be bred to which semen.
And in order to do so, I can select and run my animals according to their economic value into the future. And this is actually what we can do with that. And this has also been published and it's a very interesting work of Saleh Shahinfar using this lip chart analysis.
And let me just give you an idea that I think it's gonna be very interesting to keep in mind. You can see in this left graph. The breeding of 1000 animals.
OK. Let's assume we have 1000 animals and if we breed 100% of the 1000 animals, 300 will become pregnant. So basically we're having a conception rate of 30%, which is very common, let's say, OK, that's the A situation.
So we breed 100% of 1000 cows and we have 300 pre. But what happens internally? And that's something we normally don't think about is the fact that some cows are more fertile than other cows.
Some have suffered certain, diseases. Some simply genetically are less fertile than other cows, and the opposite. Some cows are more receptive, or more fertile at one point in time.
So that means that using additional data in this case Saleh use data. Mostly Disease and health of the animals in previous lactations or early in their life. And based on that, it is possible to predict.
What would be the consumption rate at the cow level, not at the group level, but at the cow level. And for example, in this data, it showed that if you breed only 40% of the animals, instead of 1000 animals, we're gonna breed only 400 animals. And out of those 400 animals, maybe 240 will become pregnant.
So you can see there, our conception rate will be. Lifted would be much higher for that shorter number of animals being bred. I mean, this is a difficult decision.
We understand because we are not used to do that. That would mean, for example, that we have 1000 animals eligible to be bred and we're gonna breed only less than half of that. That's, we need to convince .
The people to do that, but according to this lip chart analysis and combining that with the value of a cow, actually we were able to demonstrate that could be a value. Of skipping some breedings for some cows at some point in time that will bring additional value because if we don't breed . It would be only 400 cows instead of 1000 cows, we're saving a lot of semen on those cows.
Yes, obviously we will have zero chance of getting pregnant on the 600 cows we are not breeding, but On those 600, our conception rate would be much lower than the 400 we are breathing. So we can do more selective breeding in this case. So something interesting to keep in mind, and I think this is along the lines as well of precision breathing and, and luckily we're going to be seeing more than this in the near future.
The other thing I wanna, I wanna make you aware of, and I think this is important. More and more nowadays, we're trying to do this analysis not only at the herd level, but at the whole farm system level, right? This is the representation of the ruminant farm system model.
If you haven't heard about this, you probably will sometime soon. This has become a large project in the US. There are more than 40 or 50 scientists working at the moment on this.
The leading institution is the USDA Ford centre. They have committed and hired two full-time scientists for this. So it, it is a big deal right now, and, and there are like 10 institutions, including my university and many other universities working on this.
And each one of them are in charge of different components of this large model. My lab specifically is in charge of the animal module, or not even the whole animal module, part of the animal module. OK.
And so we can use this model to actually do more whole farm system analysis and we can impose on this the reproductive programme, and we can see what's going to be the economic outcome of the animals, but we can also see what's gonna be the greenhouse gas emissions under that situation or what are gonna be that connected with the crop, water, and energy use on the farm, which I think that's important and every time more important to keep in mind. For the near future. OK.
So we use this model to do this value of combined heifer and cow reproduction that hasn't been done until then in the literature. In the literature, there were studies of hefars and studies of cows, but not together here where we can combine of all them and we can actually even have results of the whole farm system using those systems. So the idea once again is not To describe the reproductive programmes here, but that's just to show you that there were 3 different he reproductive programmes and 4 different cow reproductive programmes and we tested all the combinations.
For example, H1 with C1 or C2 or C3 or 4, and all the potential combinations to see what is the impact of doing all these different. Reproductive programmes in heifers and cows. And here are a little more details.
You can, you can take a look more in detail that the paper is out there in the Journal of Science. OK. But, in the interest of time, I just want to show you and, and actually, the second slide of this presentation was using some of these to do the, the demonstration, this survival curve, right?
We have here the survival curves on the left for the heifers and for the cows on the, on the right, and you can see the speed at which cows are getting pregnant with different reproductive problems. And we can calculate their value. And actually, in this case, we can see Compared to the H1C1 that was the baseline programme.
We can, we can see which is the best one and it happened to be the H3C3 or H3C4. In this case, it happened to be, this, reproductive programmes on the far right were the most The most aggressive regarding synchronisation programmes in both in heifers and cows. That's the case in this case study, but that may not always be the case, in every single situation.
And that's why we always propose to do this kind of analysis for specific situations and specific conditions, as they will not hold up, in different market conditions, in different situations. This will not be applied, for example, for, for, grazing situations, for example, we will need to do a different analysis, OK. Here are some of the numbers, to look at, that we can estimate with this kind of, modelling, and we can, propose for specific systems, what's the best reproductive programme that will work on that.
And in a similar fashion, and this is getting to the last part of my presentation, is the use of sex and deep semen on the air, OK. There is a big hype about the use of deep semen and that's With a reason because the crossbred beef calves coming from there have a high value. OK.
So, we have been asked because I have this extension appointment to calculate and to see what would be, I mean, at the beginning, the question was, it is worthwhile to use the beef semen. Now the question is, is more, what's the right level of use with semen and how we should use in a more optimal way. And in order to do that, we did a series of analysis, one, what I call in the short term and another in the long term, that I would like to go through with you to get an idea, OK?
So in the short term analysis, basically we're we're calculating the income from calves over cement costs, like a, like a partial budgeting, how much we're bringing with the calves that we're producing, and how much more we are spending on the cement that we're using in these specific protocols. And in the long term we use that large model I mentioned before the roofers. To do A much large analysis, what it would be in the long term, the impact of using different strategies of sex and be semen.
In these situations. OK. So once again, here, the iros, we use this tool that we call the premium beef on dairy, and then for the, for the long term, we use the, the Rufus model I mentioned before.
So this is the simple tool and I would like to show you this also as a As an introduction to all the tools that are available on my website, you will be able to find all the tools in this link, the EMGT.info, and all the tools are openly and freely available to anyone who would like to use. Many of the tools I have been talking to the presentation, not, not many, all the tools I have been talking will be, in this place and additional document.
About the tools will be available there in addition to, I mean in most of the cases, peer review, peer reviewed papers along these tools, OK. This tool specifically is the premium data for this programme. And what he does It basically calculates two things that are here.
What I mentioned before, the IO income from calves overseeing cost. And the balance of calves produced for replacement. So these are, this would be female dairy calves.
And in this case, for example, 7 means I have extra 7 cows because I produce 45. Female dairy calves and I needed only 38. So the balance 45 minus minus 38 is 70, and I'm making 4,0036 more dollars of what I'm doing right now by using this semen in some combination with sexy.
That's the other important point I want to mention. Normally, If we have, I mean, the, the opportunity of using By comes. Better if you have good reproductive performance.
And it could be even better if you, on top of that, use sex semen to open the opportunity to use more deep semen that has a good value. OK. So we set up a farm, with conditions mostly from Wisconsin.
This has been also published in, in the Journal of Da Science Communications, . Not recently, 3 years ago. I think many of the, the, the numbers still apply, but there are some that have changed quite a bit as you will see in a moment.
But one thing I want to explain is we use different protocols to just give you an idea of the different potential results, OK? From not use sexymen all the way to use even in the first service of the second lactation cows. So from not use sexymen all the way to higher use of sexy, let's think about that way.
And the The use of sexed semen. In, in, in, in the, in the heifers. Not using sexed semen.
If they have not use sex semen, they would use conventional. They will not use this. Maybe nowadays that may be changing in some form, but in general, that's a logical.
Thinking of farmers not to use big semen on the heifers, but then in the adult cat. House, they, they would be able to use this semen from 0% all to all the way to 100%. So the way this works is, first it's set up how much sex simile would be used in certain groups of animals.
The difference, if they are heifers, they will use conventional in the difference of those animals. And if there are cows, we will set up from 0 to 100% the use of the semen on the difference. And if there are some remaining, remaining cows.
That are not set up either with sexy or beef simmer, those would be the ones that we use conventionals. So in many situations, the use will be almost exclusively of sex semen and beef semen in the adult car, but you will see that in a moment. And this is some results we can see actually using that tool, OK.
And even though it has 3 dimensions here, I think it's relatively easy to understand what we are displaying here. On the Y axis, the vertical one, we have the income from caps of cement costs. We have, we want the highest value here.
That's one thing, obviously. And on this axis here that I'm showing. Is the not the sexy men, from not used all the way to high use of sexy men.
And on this other axis we have the use of vismen from 0% all the way to 100% of vis. Now in the bars here we have either some circles or cubes and the circles. Signify surplus of replacements and the size of the circle signifies more or less, OK.
So here there is a surplus but not that much and here we have a lot of surplus of replacements. And the same on the cubes. The size of the cube means more deficit or less deficit of replacements.
If we will look at this only from the standpoint of view of the income from caps of cement costs, the margin. The best option would be this right here, the highest cube, that means I will have almost $7000 extra dollars, but on that situation. Well, in that situation, I will need to use no such semen.
All 100% of beef semen will bring me the highest value, but I will need to buy a large number of replacements to maintain my herd size. Which likely is not the preferred option in many farms, not only because they will not be able or will be uncertainty of finding those replacements, but even if those replacements are available on the farm, many farmers will not like that because of biosecurity issues. They would prefer probably to operate inside the red circle here.
That means we have a surplus of replacements. And maybe within this circle, we're gonna try to look for the highest value. That would be this one I'm pointing.
And we try to look down, this would be the level in which we use high level of sexymen, even to the first service in the second lactation, and this will be the level of using 100% of each s. So on that specific situation, We are using sexymen up to the 2nd service for the. For the calves, for the heifers, and then the rest of the heifers with conventional semen.
But in the adult cow, we are using 6 semen all the way to the first surface of the second lactation, and all the rest of the animals are using 100% of the semen, meaning adult cows are using only 6 semen or beef semen, not conventional semen. And many of you. We know that that's actually a practise that many farmers are doing at the moment in their farms.
We have run this analysis recently with the new prices. Now, the prices here were about $250 for the, for the cross beef, beef calves. Nowadays in Wisconsin, at least, the cross beef calves are about $700.
Also, the prices of the heifers, Houston or, or, or Jersey heifers have increased as well. So that compensates the, the high value of the crossbreed. But in general, nowadays, these values are 3 or 4 times higher than they were a couple of years ago.
So the opportunity of using steaks and beef semen. Is here to stay. The other thing, I haven't included here, but we recently looked at the data of the Food and Policy and agriculture Research Institute.
They do projection of the meat prices, and they seem to stay high for the foreseeable future in the next 10 years. So in, in our opinion, we think the opportunity of using beef semen in dairy will continue, at least in the foreseeable future as an additional source of income for farmers. OK.
So in the short-term analysis, as you saw in the previous slide, it, it does make sense to use sex semen together with deep semen. If we have A decent reproductive performance. OK.
Now, I'm gonna be finishing up the, the, the presentation with The long-term analysis I mentioned before using the farm system model and inside this roof as mostly using of the animal component of this model. OK. So here we follow every single cow throughout their whole life and on that cow, we can do different reproductive protocols and we can merge together groups of animals and find out what's the economic value of doing so.
And we follow every single animal with their lactation curves, which is very important to do this economic analysis, obviously, and we set up different levels of cooling according to what is, historical, numbers or records on a specific farm or group of farms. In this case, we use, historical data of large data sets to set up these levels. And then we, we set up different reproductive programmes, for example, for heifers, esto detection, or synchronisation with EU detection and only time AI, but in this case is the Cedar basically the, the, the, the device that's attached to the animal for a few days, 5 days.
And for the cows, we have also these different reproductive programmes and we combine those with the use in this case of beef semen and sex semen. And we follow, the DCRC. This is the Dairy cattle Reproductive council.
If you haven't heard of it, it's a very, important and interesting source actually of information. They have their website, DCRC. If you Google, you will find it very easily.
And they do actually release the latest protocols in reproductive performance. So we follow these are like a standard or, or official reproductive protocols in the industry. So we follow those to do our analysis, OK?
So without going into the detail also here, just to mention that we tested two reproductive performance, high and moderate, and for each one of those from low to intense level of use of beef and sex semen scenarios, OK. And we saw what would be the economic value of all those. And we use, I mean, standard values of what we have at the moment in the market for prices and costs.
And we found out very importantly that in all the cases you can see here the base is the one that doesn't use sex of deep semen. And the other values are the difference, and you can see the differences are always positive, meaning that they are higher than the base. Whether it is high or moderate level of reproductive performance, these values were positive, meaning that the use of sex and be semen, whether it is low or high intensity, always got a higher, higher value than the baseline, not using sex and semen.
Indeed, in both cases, the use of intense levels of sex and bisimmen gave us the highest value compared to the base. So That seems to be even with the moderate level of reproductive performance. Obviously having higher reproductive performance will always give a higher value.
And as I mentioned, in this rofa big model, it allows us to see actually what is the final demographics of the, of the herd when we use one reproductive firm or another reproductive problem, OK? Without going into the details here, I think this is very important information for decision making in many farms so they can project what's going to happen in the long term. OK.
And also it will measure those metrics of reproductive. The performance as we saw at the beginning of the presentation. For example, we calculate what's the 21 day pregnancy rate and as expected in the base, we will have a higher pregnancy rate than in the The protocol using sex and beef semen because as we know, the sex semen specifically will decrease our fertility of the breedings or the conception rate.
So, but even though they have lower pregnancy rate, the value will be higher as we saw in the previous slide, right? And we will have obviously additional statistics of the demographics of the herd, which is once again, very important for decision making. On Kurds, OK.
So just finishing up here, for the long term analysis of this sex and be semen, in general, as you saw on the table before, in all the cases, it was worthwhile to use sex and be semen, and it seemed to be that in 10 scenarios were the ones that get the highest value in this situation. OK. So, We believe that both approaches are short and long term, are useful and complementary.
Short term is very easy to use. You can find the tool, after this presentation on the website and enter your numbers and you will have the assessment right away. In real time.
The long term will require a little more involvement and entry of data and even the simulation itself will take some time, but, we are planning in the near future, the long term will also be available for, final users like yourselves in the website, OK? So, we have tools as I mentioned, one of those is as well, the use of sexymen for heifers that compliments, the ones we have, showed before. In this case, it will tell you.
What's the right number or the optimal number of sex semen services for the heifers? The assumption in this tool is the use of sex semen is mostly on the heifers, and this tool will tell you, depending on the market conditions and the reproductive performance of the herd, what should be. The right level.
In this case, for example, for average conception rate of a herd, the best use of sex semen would be 2 breedings. The first and the second breeding gives you the highest value. And in general, what we have found using that tool specifically is this is dependent on the conception rate of the of the conventional semen.
At a certain level, you can see here when the conception rate is very low, one service of sexymen will be the best option, the green line here, and at some point they cross over with the two services, the blue line, and that seems to be the best. Scenario, when The conception rate for heifers goes above 45%, but obviously I, I want always to mention the fact that this would be case by case and luckily we have the tools that will allow you to do this analysis and the specific market conditions and farm inputs. I mentioned the economic value of a dairy cow before and this is the tool.
You will be able to find it on, on the same website I mentioned before. And just by defining the values on the left in red, in yellow, it will give you the results right away. Like for example, this.
Cow has a value of $507 based on these characteristics, and we can see how this value will change if this cow gets sick or if this cow loses the pregnancy or things like that. And I think that's very important for decision making and specifically in this case, we can do better decisions for reproduction based on this value of the cow. OK?
. What's the value of a cow? How we come with that value of 500 as before, is basically we are projecting . How much money we are making for a cow from today to the future.
That's the blue line here. That's the evaluated cow, and we always compare with a potential replacement, which is the red one here. If we aggregate all the values from now to the future for the evaluated cow, that would be 17,562.
And we calculate the same for the replacement and it would be, for example, 17,850. And we put on top of that, the potential cost of replacing. Because what we're doing in the farm is we have a slot, and that slot can be used by this cow or potentially by a replacement.
And we're doing that analysis, which is gonna give us in the long term, more net return. And that if we decide to replace, we need an additional cost that will be the cost of replacing the animal. So if we put all this together, we calculate the cow value, and if this value is positive, we're better off keeping this animal on the herd.
But if it is negative, we'll be better off replacing the animal that will bring us more value in the long term. I discussed this slide before and I think that's important to emphasise here. We can use that tool before of the value of the cow to actually calculate these data points and based on that, hopefully make better reproductive decisions at the cow level what I mentioned before, like the precision, reproductive management.
And the last tool I want to share with you is the most involved we have, and we call UW Cornell the Reaper. And this has been in collaboration with Cornell, Julie Giordano, who is a professor there as well. When, when he was here, actually, we work, heavily on this.
And, and the idea of this tool is basically, and it's unique in that sense. There is no other tool out there that will allow you to describe. Fully reproductive programmes.
We can define the first AI postpartum, the second, and subsequent AIs, and then inside, we can introduce heat detection at different levels. We can use activity monitors and everything that's available for dairy farms, and we can define even the calendar of the different actions, the hormone use or the heat detection, etc. Etc.
And this tool will give you a final value. How much it brings an alternative reproductive programme. For example, in this case, switching from pre-sync of sync to double up sync, even though the double of sync likely will have more costs involved, more investments involved, it will increase about $48 per car a year, even though, as I mentioned before, it requires additional investments.
So, overall conclusions, the website Day MGT info is openly available. I wish you visit it and take advantage of it. It's openly and freely available.
There are a number of tools. All the tools I discussed today are there except the roofa that hopefully at some point, part of it at least will be there. And as I mentioned, this rooffas is under intense development and Hopefully All or part of it would be available there.
And I think that's important to mention because this will allow to combine the reproductive analysis with all other management strategies on the farm. And with that, I would like to close and thank you for your kind attention and I mean, hopefully get at some point questions or interaction with the audience, if at all possible. But, the main way to get in touch with me is through my website that you can see here and I'm normally available on email and I try to respond in a very short period.
Thank you.