"PREG-Testing" Your Cows

By Steve Swigert

Since reproduction is the #1 driver of profitability for cow-calf operations, determining if your cows are pregnant or not is crucial to all cow-calf operations. Keeping a cow that is open is very costly with total annual cost ($800-900) for most operations. By not pulling the bulls, it will spread out the calf crop and will ultimately decrease the value of the calf crop by not being able to market them in larger groups. Also, it will spread out your window for having calves, making it more costly through increased labor, fuel, etc.

An additional benefit might be finding a few more open cows which could signal a health issue that could be solved sooner than later.

In other words, it gives you the opportunity to determine your Pregnancy % per Exposed Cow. If your operation is not 90%+ in this number, then further analysis needs to take place. This would be good time to improve your reproduction rate with calf prices to this level. To do that, operations need to pregnancy test their cows.

The methods for pregnancy testing include rectal palpation, ultrasound and blood tests. Today, more veterinarians are using ultrasound rather than palpation, because it is easier and they can detect pregnancy earlier (as early as 28 days)

In comparing the three methods, ultrasound is the most accurate and you get more information from it or palpation than with blood tests. The blood test only tells whether a cow is pregnant or not and has the potential to give some false positives

There are two ways to do ultrasound—with the traditional arm-in rectal probed, or the newer extension-arm probe that eliminates the need for inserting an arm into every cows. The advantage to the extension-arm unit is that it’s much easier on the person doing the pregnancy testing.

With a veterinarian shortage in several areas, many ranches have the staff trained for preg-testing cows and that can be very helpful when it comes to scheduling. It gives the operation much more flexibility, especially if the operation has multiple herds to process.

If a veterinarian is not available, it might be possible to check with larger operations to see if they had someone that could help you out with this job. In any event, keeping open cows in this time of high priced cull cows, price of calves, and increased expenses does not make economic sense for cattle operations.