Home News News AI Experts deliver the goods 16 Jun 2004 Industry newcomer Deer Improvement is delighted with conception rates achieved in its first mating season. Scanning has been completed in customers’ herds as well as those herds under contract for progeny test purposes, and the average is just shy of 70%. Company director Peter Gatley said the thing that impressed most has been the consistency. “We’ve analysed the data from every angle - by stag, by batch, by herd, by Technician, and the results clearly show that artificial insemination of deer is an efficient and effective process that can put the very best genetics within reach of every commercial farmer”. Deer Improvement’s parent company, Livestock Improvement Corporation, employs a thousand Technicians to perform three million inseminations each year in dairy cattle. Many of the Technicians are farmers themselves, and the team includes several hundred women. There was no shortage of volunteers for training on deer, and the lucky twelve, including one male, were literally hand picked. “For AI in deer, size does matter” said Sean O’Sullivan, a Deer Improvement manager with years of experience managing LIC Technicians in the South Island. “Most of our team were new to deer when they arrived for training at Invermay, but with hundreds of thousands of cattle insems between them, we expected them to pick it up quickly. The scanning data shows only a 7% range in their performance, so there’s no doubt they’ve all performed”. Peter Gatley says another pleasing outcome of the season was the success of fresh semen. “Stags produce relatively small amounts of semen, and only on a seasonal basis, so it’s important to make the most of it. An ejaculate that would provide 100 straws of frozen semen is enough for 1000 straws of fresh, and it also diminishes complications relating to stags that don’t freeze well. It all adds up to a more efficient and reliable service at lower cost”.

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