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Misidentification, How does it happen?
A question that is commonly asked after learning of the >25% industry misidentification rate, is: Where does the misidentification usually occur? There is no single correct answer for this question. Each situation is different and generally problems are different at each individual farm.
How Misidentification Can Occur:
- Large calving pens. Several animals calving at the same time unsupervised could be one of the biggest reasons for midID. For example you wake up in the morning and there are 2 newborn calves and 2 fresh cows. Are you certain you know who the mother is for each one? Further errors can be made if the cows are removed from the pen before the calves have been tagged.
- Improper documentation after multiple breedings. Not remembering what sire was used on which animal or perhaps accidentally mixing up sire codes or individual animal management numbers.
- Data Entry. Sometimes there can be one person doing the breeding and one person doing the data entry. Misinterpreting someone’s handwriting can cause confusion.
- Many times if a herd is using multiple YS, it is easy to switch numbers when recording a breeding, or when transferring the information into the computer. For example 11H7677 can easily be recorded as 11H7767.
- Missing tags. Improper tagging and management conditions can also play a role. Obviously, making sure you put the right tag in the right calf sounds simple enough but is one more place where errors can happen. And making sure they stay in for the rest of her life isn’t a certainty. If a tag is lost, retagging provides one more place where error can creep in. Luckily since the ADVANTAGE program provides a set of three tags for each animal born, lost tags are generally not a problem in our herds.
- Cito Cutter. Even your straw cutter could be the culprit. When you are doing multiple breedings in a short period, semen can live and transfer to that little knife, and then from straw to straw.
- Breeding once to AI. Some reproduction protocols have a one time AI and an almost immediate sort to the clean up pen. Sounds crazy, but it does happen. What happens when you see “Barnyard Billy” mounting that same animal or animals you bred the previous morning? If the animal becomes pregnant, the only recorded breeding was to AI, but it’s more likely Barnyard Billy gets the credit if she was in standing heat a day after the AI breeding.
- The AI industry itself can’t shift all the blame to the farmers. Although very unlikely to happen it is possible to mix up semen collections right at the stud. Even printing the wrong semen code or information on each straw. Strict protocols are in place to prevent errors but just as it is possible to mix up a couple heifer calves mixing up semen is possible as well.
When you think about all the possibilities for error, the 25% figure is not as surprising. Accurate identification starts with accurately identifying both the animal being bred and the sire being used. This sounds easy enough, but when there are 25+ cows to breed in one pen on ov-synch days and multiple sires are used, a proper recording system needs to be in place to identify which cow was bred to which sire. Of course the accurate identification of the cow and the sire are worthless if the information isn’t ACCURATELY recorded, and then ACCURATELY transferred into the computer then all possibilities of an accurately identified calf are gone.
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Posted Jun 3rd
