The earlier you get onto cleaning those ‘dirty cows’ the better your 6 week in calf rate will be!

Endometritis is an infection of the inner lining of the uterus, often caused by: contamination of a dead calf, assisted calvings, retained fetal membranes, nutritional issues, and metabolic issues. However, in many cases there is no apparent cause. It is a common and costly disease in New Zealand dairy herds.

Endometritis is a subclinical disease so metrichecking needs to be performed to diagnose it. Whole herd metrichecking is ideal as you may miss some dirty cows if you’re just checking ‘at risk’ cows (difficult calvings, twins, down cows etc). There are 2 ways to go about metrichecking, either a whole herd check four weeks out from planned start of mating. Or you could do a more intensive three check plan starting 3-4 weeks after planned start of calving. With this method we metricheck on 2 more occasions in 3 week intervals.

The three check plan is recommended and proven to be most effective. A recent New Zealand study including over 15,000 dairy cows, showed using the more intensive three check plan produced a 9.6% increase in six week in calf rates. The study also found that early identification and treatment of infected cows led to a 3.4-4.4 times investment return making it very worthwhile and something to consider if you want to improve your in-calf and 6 week in-calf rates.

Give us a call to book your metrichecking now!