The Benefits of Early Pregnancy Scanning in Cattle
Pregnancy diagnosis (PD) is an essential part of fertility management within a suckler herd. The ability to determine the pregnancy status of your stock early has several cost saving benefits as carrying empty cows’ costs money!
Minimising passengers not only ensures that only productive cows are taken through the winter, saving on feed, bedding and space but contributes towards reducing emissions and meeting climate change targets.
The costs associated with feeding and managing livestock are significant on any farm or croft. Early pregnancy testing ensures that resources are not wasted on non-reproductive livestock. This is especially important looking ahead to this winter as the dry summer has impacted silage crops with several farmers concerned about low yields Most spring calving herds will be looking to remove bulls from cows, if they haven’t already done so. Ideally cows should be scanned six weeks post breeding.
The earlier cows are pregnancy diagnosed (PD’d), the more accurately calving dates can be predicted. This allows for better, more affective rationing as cows can then be grouped by stages of pregnancy and lactation. Also, another advantage is detecting twins, which can be harder to identify later. This is because scanners use the size of the foetus to determine how old it is on that day. Later scanning means that the foetus will have dropped down into the belly of the cow, which then makes it harder to estimate it’s size. If pregnancy diagnosis is left until later in the year, when cows are housed, twins are often missed, which can result in increased losses and poorer fertility in the following year. Knowing which cows are carrying twins allows you to increase nutrition for a successful calving and manage body condition to help with getting the cow back in calf again.
By knowing cow due dates this allows for more timely administration of vaccines. Scour vaccines given to cows where protection is passed onto the calf via colostrum intake, are only fully affective if the cow has been vaccinated 3 – 12 weeks before calving. For later calving cows’ vaccination can be delayed, to ensure that all the herd is fully and effectively vaccinated, ensuring all calves are protected.
Another advantage to scanning early, is to get empty cows off farm earlier and take advantage of any peaks in cull cow trade before housing when greater numbers of cull cows are traded. Also, those who scan after housing, will have likely dosed and treated all cows, which will mean they are under a medicine withdrawal period, before finding out they are not in calf. This results in empty cows being kept on farm for longer.
Pregnancy diagnosis also provides important data for informed breeding decisions and investigation into why these cows are barren Identifying why animals are empty will help to mitigate against this for the next year e.g. a sub fertile bull or poor cow condition. As a reminder the industry target for barren cows is no more than 5%.
Pregnancy testing in cattle is a valuable practice that helps improve efficiency. It enables better decision making around feeding, breeding, and culling inevitably leading to cost savings. Managing and improving the fertility of your suckler herd is one of the key ways to improve cow margins.
5 Top Tips
- Aim to scan from six weeks after bull has been removed to improve accuracy of scanning results. Remember there may be some animals that need rechecked due to the stage of foetus development.
- Detection of twins is easier when scanning earlier. However, not all scanners are able to detect twins.
- Scanning early allows empty cows to be sold promptly following weaning.
- Do not carry passengers over winter when feed resources could well be limited.
- Investigate why cows are barren to prevent more empty cows in the following year.
Laura MacGregor, Consultant, Laura.Macgregor@sac.co.uk
Unearthed is the exclusive SAC Consulting members' monthly newsletter. Unearthed offers insights and tips from our experts on what we think is in store for farming and crofting in the coming months in order to protect and enhance your business.
Posted by Unearthed News on 15/09/2025
