There has been a long history of herd health and production management programmes in many dairy industries around the world, but evidence for the efficacy of such programmes is limited. In response to a perceived decline in fertility of dairy cows, a herd reproductive management programme (InCalf) was introduced in New Zealand in 2007. This programme uses a management cycle approach that includ...

Maintaining the health of animals in a beef breeding herd is critical to insure optimum herd productivity since the major contributor to overall herd performance is the reproductive rate. Because of this level of importance, it is essential to carefully monitor all aspects of herd reproduction on a production year basis in order to monitor each year’s production and make good management decisio...

A questionnaire-based survey on veterinary herd health and production management services was conducted on 194 specialist dairy veterinarians and 466 dairy farmers. The farmers were randomly selected from greater than 6,000 farmer clients of the surveyed veterinarians. This paper reports these survey findings and the findings of an earlier survey conducted among the veterinarians. The survey in...

Analysing the effect of pastoral risk management strategies provides insights into a system of subsistence that have persevered in marginal areas for hundreds to thousands of years and may shed light into the future of around 200 million households in the face of climate change. This study investigated the efficiency of herd accumulation as a buffer strategy by analysing changes in livestock ho...

BACKGROUND Several management and environmental factors are known as contributory causes of clinical mastitis in dairy herd. The study objectives were to describe the structure of herd-specific mastitis management and environmental factors and to assess the relevance of these herd-specific indicators to mastitis incidence rate. METHODS Disease reports from the Danish Cattle Data Base and a ma...

Peterson, M.J., Grant, W.E. and Davis, D.S., 1991. Simulation of host-parasite interactions within a resource management framework: impact of brucellosis on bison population dynamics. Ecol. Modelling, 54: 299-320. We describe development of a simulation model representing bison (host)-bruceilosis (parasite) interactions within a natural resource management framework. We document three phases in...

In order to meet the requirement of dairy cattle breeding and modern cattle farm management, the dairy cattle registration and herd management system was programmed with Visual FoxPro9.0, which can run on Windows9X/Me/NT/2000/XP, to fit the current implemented Canadian dairy cattle DHI recorders and 9-point linear comprehensive evaluation. Based on data collection and analysis of basic herd inf...

BACKGROUND There have been few studies published internationally which document herd health management practices in suckler beef herds and no published Irish studies. The study objective was to document herd health status and management practices on sixteen Irish suckler beef herds over a two year period (2009-2010). The farms used in the study were part of the Teagasc BETTER farm beef programm...

Test-day genetic evaluation models have many advantages compared with those based on 305-d lactations; however, the possible use of test-day model (TDM) results for herd management purposes has not been emphasized. The aim of this paper was to study the ability of a TDM to predict production for the next test day and for the entire lactation. Predictions of future production and detection of ou...