Routine Visits
Routine visits are available for any farm enterprise. Working together with you, our aim is to improve health and welfare and optimise production and profitability.
Subjects we cover at any of these visits include:
Fertility
Nutrition
Mastitis
Housing
Young stock
Infectious diseases
Lameness
Welfare issues
We work as a team with two solely large animal vets and two dedicated part-time vets. Together we share knowledge and aim to stay up to date with the latest developments.
Next to preventive medicine we are available for individual sick animals, and 24-7 for emergencies. All farm animal examinations are by appointment only. Most of these animals will be seen on the farm, but smaller farm animals can be seen at the surgery in Lewes.
Fees are based on a combination of a visit fee (depending on where you live), time spent on the farm and drugs given.
Please contact Jo or Tracy at our farm office for more details on our hourly rate and visit fee to you farm.
Fertility
We do fertility visits for both dairy and beef clients. Ultrasound scanners are used for individual cow pregnancy testing and assessment of ovarian function. Pregnancy testing can be performed from 30 days onwards.
For dairy cows the advantages of routine fertility visits are:
• Vaginal checks post-calving to check for metritis and treat if necessary
• Assessing ovarian function of those cows that were not seen bulling. Early treatment of these cows will reduce the time between calving and first service and therefore reduce your calving interval
• Pregnancy diagnosis from 30 days. Early detection of empty cows allows for earlier intervention, reducing the calving interval.
For beef cows the advantages of pregnancy diagnosis are:
• Allowing for a more accurate timing of calving
• Identify empty cows at an earlier stage
• Allowing for earlier intervention in fertility problems
As the scanners have a rechargeable battery, electricity supply is not necessary.
Nutrition
Making use of RUMNUT and Interherd software allows us to asses any rations fed to the cows. This is best combined with an on farm assessment of the cows, looking at rumen function, body condition scores, dung consistency, feed space and other nutrition related issues. If necessary samples can be taken for metabolic profiles that will tell us what is going on at cow level.
In this way we can offer an unbiased opinion of the ration fed.
Our aim is to work together with you and your nutritional adviser to get the best out of your cows.
Mastitis
Prevention of mastitis, both clinical as well as subclinical, is an important element in increasing productivity and health and welfare on today’s dairies.
We can help by:
• Culturing selected individual milk samples to find the cause of the mastitis or elevated cell count
• Culturing of bulk milk samples to get a view of the infection at herd level
• Accessing NMR/farm records/Clover reports
• On- farm investigations:
o Bill Pepper has been trained in the national Dairy Co mastitis investigation protocol. Analysis of mastitis data, laboratory investigations of milk samples and on-farm observations will establish the source of herd mastitis problems
• Teat scoring
Housing
Youngstock
Infectious diseases
Lameness