We had an amazing time celebrating the end of the season with many of our dairy farmers at our Repro Round-Up dinner at the start of May.
The highlight of the evening was sharing the strong reproductive results achieved by our farms this season. I’ll briefly summarise some of the key data and a few of the take-home messages that I covered on the night...
First of all, in the table below there's the average empty rates and 6-week in-calf rates (6WICR) from all of the farms we've pregnancy scanned at from the last dairy six seasons.
This year, the average empty rate was 13% and the average 6WICR was 70% (the industry target is 78%, which is what the very best herds in New Zealand are expected to achieve).
This shows that the average 6WICR this season is significantly better than the previous few seasons, meaning our farms managed to get more cows in calf sooner. It's important to remember though, this data only pertains to those farms that age scan (and so can generate accurate in-calf rates that early).
It also shows that the empty rate has been slowly creeping up each year during this time. However, this season it remained similar to last season, so the overall in-calf rate in the end was still relatively the same, despite the better 6WICR.
Below is a graph of the breakdown of different empty rates from the farms we scanned. When looking at empty rates, keep in mind that they include many different farm systems, mating lengths, and reasons that cows may be empty.
Empty rates (%) from farms we pregnancy scanned - each blue bar is one farm.
From this graph we can see that empty rates range from a very low 4.5% to a high 20%, with the median being 13%.
Excitingly, we also saw some improved empty results on certain farms this year. The next graph shows individual farm's changes in empty rates from the 2024-25 season to the 2025-26 season.
Change in empty rates (%) from the 2024-25 season to the 2025-26 season - each coloured bar is one farm that either reduced or increased their rate.
The most notable change was Farm 19, who dramatically improved their rate by 25%, with new management bringing leadership and experience that affected their on-farm practices. After using wearable tech for the first time this season, Farm 29 reduced their empty rate by about 7%. Achieving a similar reduction, Farm 34's improvement is likely due to the CIDR programme they did for their non-cycling cows this mating.
If you’d like to know more about this data or delve further into your own farm’s reproductive performance, get in touch with us. We're here to help if you'd like to find areas of your repro systems that could be focused on for improvement next season.
All in all, congratulations to everyone for the great repro results, which reflect the hard work that you’ve put in throughout the whole season! We really enjoyed hosting you all for a night off-farm to celebrate.
