28 NEBRASKA CATTLEMAN February 2024 “They should be viewed as a catch point if our isolation tactics and biosecurity fail,” Daly said. “There are some situations where vaccines are absolutely necessary, but for other situations we can think about them as safety nets.” The BVD herd Daly mentioned did not have a vaccination program, which could have saved several cattle from dying. “I’m pretty confident that those cattle wouldn’t have that problem to the extent that they did if there had been a vaccination in place,” Daly said. “The safety net of vaccines comes into play when you encounter situations you can’t control, like a compromised fence that allows neighboring herds to mingle with your cattle.” Another step to ensure the effectiveness of a vaccine program is scheduling time to review it. “It’s critical to make sure your vaccine program is successful by considering several things,” Daly said. “You should evaluate the appropriateness of your current program by talking to your veterinarian, assess your available labor force, the vaccine schedule and if you might be missing something.” In between uses it is also important to ensure the vaccination storage method is adequate. “If your vaccines are refrigerated, you need to regularly check to make sure [your refrigerator] is operating at an appropriate temperature and is a safe place to keep those vaccines,” Daly said. Reproductive Efficiency Another speaker at the Range Beef Cow Symposium addressed herd reproductive efficiency. Shelby Rosasco, Ph.D., assistant professor and Extension beef specialist at the University of Wyoming, defines reproductive efficiency with three components. “Reproductive efficiency can be defined many ways,” Rosasco said. “However, I define it as optimizing pregnancy rates early in the breeding season, selecting and developing heifers that are highly fertile at the lowest cost possible and ensuring your females have adequate longevity in the herd.” The first step to reproductive efficiency is managing pertinent information. “Reproductive efficiency starts with making data-driven decisions, so we need to be able to maintain records,” Rosasco said. “You don’t have to have a fancy, expensive record-keeping system. It can be Excel, a daybook or whatever works for you.” Some factors that influence reproduction include nutrition, health, reproductive management, stress selection and genetics. “You have to think past the management strategies that directly influence the cow’s reproductive efficiency, but also things that might indirectly affect it,” Rosasco said. “Some of these things can be feed prices, labor costs, land availability, weather conditions and other factors that will affect our management decisions that will trickle down and affect her fertility.” One of the biggest influences on reproductive efficiency is the cow’s nutrition and diet. “Nutrition is an important mediator in a lot of reproductive events,” Rosasco said. “It affects the puberty attainment of our heifers, the length of the post-partum and estrus period and the longevity and retention of the cow herd.” There are simple reproductive technologies that producers can implement to help them navigate reproductive efficiency better, including pregnancy detection and estrus synchronization. “Integrating pregnancy detection will help you have a better understanding of how the breeding season went,” Rosasco said. “Shifting your calf crop to earlier in the season with estrus synchronization will positively influence the postpartum interval and create a more uniform calf crop.” She says it is also important for producers to think about reproduction from a big-picture perspective. “We tend to think about reproduction right before the breeding season, during the breeding season and again during pregnancy detection,” Rosasco said. “However, fertility is not a onetime event. Everything that you’re doing throughout the year is impacting her fertility. Our decisions about every area of management affects reproduction in the long term.” For more from the Range Beef Cow Symposium, visit www.rangebeefcowsymposium.com. ~NC~ HERD HEALTH AND REPRODUCTIVE MANAGEMENT CONTINUED FROM PAGE 27 Components to a systems approach to herd reproduction efficiency is outlined in this circular image from the presentation from Shelby Rosasco, Ph.D.
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