The breeding season has started at home this week and heat detection will become a big priority for everyone on the farm for the next few months. It’s a sign of the times that notebooks have been replaced by mobile phones for taking down numbers over the last few years. Artificial insemination (AI) serves are also recorded through the phone with a hard copy kept in the diary as well, just to be safe.

Our five-year-old had a bad dream the other night that his pet rabbit was being attacked by a bear. While he was bravely fighting off the bear, his daddy was looking up how to kill bears on his phone.

I’d like to think I might be a bit more useful than that in a crisis, but it’s an indication of how much we rely on technology now in our everyday lives. When deciding on which cow to breed to which bull, the phone holds the cow’s details as well as a link to the ICBF website to look up the latest figures on the bulls. Sometimes there’s enough time to go through all of the data, but at other times it’s a matter of matching them up as best you can before getting on with the job.

All of the cows were tail-painted at the start of the season and will be observed in the field twice daily, as well as at milking times. We also scanned the cows on Monday to give us a headstart with any cows that have problems and hopefully get them sorted out quickly.

Most of the herd were fine, but a few had developed cysts, a few more needed a washout and another batch hadn’t started cycling yet. Some of these non-cyclers are a bit fresh, so more time should sort them out.

We could have concentrated a bit more on pre-mating heat detection and picked out the problems that way, but the problem cows would still have to be checked by a vet at that stage. This way, we know what’s cycling normally and we know straight away what’s wrong with the rest of them and what treatment they need. With quotas gone now, we will try to get as many cows bred and in calf as quickly as possible over the next few weeks.

We will start breeding the heifers next week. We always find that they start calving early anyway, so we like to leave them a few days longer than the cows.

We will AI a group of 40 and put bulls out with the rest. They will have Friesian bulls for the first six weeks before we put in some Angus bulls to tidy up.

We will concentrate on dairy bulls with the cows for the first six weeks as well before switching to some easy-calving, short-gestation Angus and Belgian Blue bulls for the end of the breeding season. We are often asked which Friesian bulls we are using, so the list includes KKG, GTW, RNC, RRB, FZZ, LFK, CFW, DQI, AKE, GZF and DGQ.

Grass has started to grow a bit better at last over the past two weeks. We are still feeding 4kg of meal, but have been able to drop silage out of the diet.

We are comfortable rather than flush with grass and will close the gate on a few silage fields, with the option of grazing again if necessary. We will top up with fertilizer for silage before the end of the month when we should be a bit more certain about where we will be cutting.