A bull’s fertility is crucial to your herd’s performance and can be very costly if it goes wrong. Infertile bulls are rare and often easily discovered, however sub-fertile bulls are much more common, harder to identify and can be much more costly. Having a sub-fertile bull can lead to an elongated breeding period and a greater number of barren cows. This leads to a stretched calving period which in turn increases labour costs and causes a variation of calf ages within the group, leading to greater levels of disease such as pneumonia and scours, further increasing costs.
When should you test your bull?
We recommend annual pre-breeding examination, 6-8 weeks before the start of the breeding season. It has been found that a bulls fertility reduces each year from 24 months old and a lot can change from one year to the next. Also consider pre or post purchase examination, prior to sale and testing bulls suspected of having poor fertility.
Although bull fertility testing doesn’t guarantee fertility it is a really useful tool to screen out problem bulls before they cause an issue.
