Many studies and research articles have been conducted and all have drawn the same conclusion: There is no physical way to remove horns on dairy animals without creating a task no human wants to do – causing pain to an animal – and thus creating an image the general public cannot understand.

TRENDING TOPIC ARTICLE: A.I. & BREEDING Published: December 12, 2011 Progressive Dairyman print issue In this past article, Lyle Kruse, vice president of U.S. market development at Select Sires, details the company’s development of Select Detect. to jump to the article.

In today’s dairy industry, if you bring up the topic of activity monitors, producers will most likely know what you are talking about. Most are aware of activity monitoring systems, though they may have started wondering whether these systems are right for their operations only recently.

For every dairy producer, the primary objective of good reproductive management is to assure cows calve at optimal intervals and maintain milk production at peak levels of efficiency. However, this requires producers to constantly keep a close eye on their cows, which isn’t always an easy task.

Achieving good pregnancy rates on a consistent basis is a crucial component of a profitable dairy enterprise. However, reproduction is affected by many factors, and consequently evaluating a herd to identify the bottlenecks limiting reproductive performance is a challenge. The Penn State Reproduction Drill Down Tool provides a systematic approach to critically analyze the major factors affecting heat detection rate and conception rate so that problem areas can be highlighted and discussed. The tool was rigorously tested by Penn State Extension educators and consultants across more than 15 herds, and then revised before being released. “Several dairymen made comments to the effect that they had never been asked questions related to reproductive management in such an organized manner,” noted Dr. Mike O’Connor, Penn State professor emeritus of dairy science, one of the original developers of the tool.

Over the last 30 years, people have searched for alternatives to traditional observation of cows to detect estrus. Injections to synchronize estrus/ovulation have replaced observations and are now a common tool in many dairy farms.