An Economic Assessment of Twin births in British Dairy Herds

Abstract

One side-effect of a veterinary practice offering a bureau computerised recording service to its dairy farmers is that a large database of health, fertility, and production is developed in relatively few years. It was the use of such a recording scheme, the DAISY system developed at the University of Reading and operated from a veterinary practice that provided the data for this study. The increasing use of such schemes by practitioners should lead to the creation of large quantities of data which should answer many questions relating to health, fertility, and production.

With the development of a commercial service offering to implant twin embryos into dairy cows it seemed opportune to measure the effect that twinbirths has on production in dairy cows using data from the practice recording scheme.