By chance on Wednesday at the NMR/RABDF Open Day at Bristol I met with James Hanks of Reading University who has developed the software used by NMR in their Interherd programs the best known of which is Herd Companion. This allows analysis of 17 Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) of data collected at the monthly milk recording and shows a five year history for each herd.
James has done analysis of a group of 33 Guernsey herds that have the full NMR recording program and has made a link available for us to use.
www.panlivestock.com/InterHerd+.htm
I have taken figures for just three of the measures to illuminate the “Fertility debate ” as management of your cows has such a major impact on this important factor.
1) Percentage of Cows served by Day 80 after calving The Range here is 71% compared to 9% with the “Best” 8 herds averaging 55% and the “Worst” 8 herds averaging 23%
2) Percentage of Cows that have concieived by day 100 after calving. The Range here is 46% compared to 4% with the “Best” 8 herds averaging 29% and the “Worst” 8 herds averaging 9%
3) Days to 1st Service from Calving . The Range here is 78 days compared to 164 days and the “Best” 8 herds average 88 days and the “Worst” 8 herds average 144 days and therefore the Calving Interval for these two quartiles will be 375 days as compared to 431 days before the “Fertility” of either the cows or indeed the sires comes into play. In fact the actual Calving Intervals range between 408 days and 442 days.
I have placed “Best” and “Worst” in parenthesis as yield levels and diet constituents will affect these figures but I hope you will agree that there is plenty of information contained within these tables by which Guernsey herd performance can be compared and probably improved.
Looking at the other breeds listed the Range of Performance is very similar.