Looking for advice on AI
Hey everyone hope you're all good. First time posting here so would really appreciate any and all feedback.
My question is what is everyone's AI protocols and what do you do to ensure your success rate?
The reason I ask is because we weren't so lucky last year and I am afraid we won't be either this year.
For context I'm 19 helping my mum day to day with the running of the farm.
We've entered our sixth year of using AI and while the first 4 years went smoothly last year didn't go well at all.
We're a small holding of on average a year about 10 to 12 cows calving, the first 4 years we always had all of them in calf and on average 8 or 9 would hold to first insemination and the rest would only be repeated once.
Last year at the end of Summer after great difficulty and numerous repeats we only had 5 in calf. It was pretty devastating.
So far this year we have 11 out of 12 inseminated in a 15 day window with the last one we suspect we might have missed last Monday due to extreme heat we had so we think we might have missed her activity.
I typically check them once every 2 hours between 4AM and 11PM and the longest I go without seeing them is that time in between when I sleep.
Before we started with insemination this year my mum got our vet who was a childhood friend of hers to take blood and dung samples, test the soil and just walk the land for anything that stood out to him. The bloods and dung came back fine and the soil which surprised us as we expected to find something that'd help us understand.
I do believe we had to have got something wrong but mum believes it could be our technician.
For context I will add that our technician has become somewhat unreliable with his timekeeping these last two years.
In the first four years he was always reliable with his time keeping typically arriving at us for a morning run between 9AM and 10AM with 11AM being the latest for him, the evening run then was between 6PM and 8PM. Last year and so far this year the earliest he'll come to us is 11AM and can often be 1PM before he'd show for a morning run and about 7PM to 9PM for an evening.
He does sometimes take personal days on account of his son playing matches so we'd be left with the dilemma of inseminsting one that was only standing at 5AM at 8AM same morning because otherwise he wouldn't be available until 11AM next morning.