The National Dairy Cattle Reproduction Council (DCRC) will be holding two regional meetings in 2009; one in Minneapolis, MN on November 12-13, the other in Boise, ID on November 19-20. A copy of the agendas for these meetings can be downloaded from my web page under "News and Announcements" at: http://www.uwex.edu/ces/dairyrepro/index.cfm.

To register for these meetings online, visit the DCRC web site at: http://www.dcrcouncil.org/CONVENTIONS/index.html.

For those who missed it, Dr. Albert De Vries from the University of Florida and Dr. Ray Nebel from Slect Sires, Inc. presented an interesting analysis of the effect of sexed semen use in the dairy industry on future supply of dairy replacements at the 2009 Western Dairy Management Conference in Reno, NV. You can download a copy of the proceedings paper from the WDMC web site here: http://www.wdmc.org/proceed.htm. They estimate that less than 1% of all heifers entering milking herds by the end of 2008 were conceived by sexed semen. By the end of 2009, this will be increase to about 2% of all heifers and is estimated to be 6% by the end of 2010.

I just uploaded to my web site three reproduction resource articles published by the National Dairy Cattle Reproduction Council (DCRC). The articles are:

Managing Reproductive Performance During Times of Heat Stress
Tips to Improve Conception Rates
Top 10 Places Successful Reproductive Managers Focus their Time

If you use this information in your newsletters, please give credit to the National DCRC for the information. The article on heat stress is particularly timely considering the weather we're experiencing this week.

These DCRC articles can be downloaded from the Repro Topics page of my web site located here under "National DCRC reproduction resources.

In response to requests from county faculty for newsletter content, I have created a new section of my web site entitled "Repro Redux" where I will be uploading reproduction related articles. Redux is an adjective meaning "brought back or restored" from the Latin reducere "to bring back". This article series will help to restore reproduction to its rightful place of importance on production dairies. 

To access these articles, go to my web site at: http://www.uwex.edu/ces/dairyrepro/ and click on the "Staff Resources" link under the red menu on the left. You will need to enter your UWEX logon ID and password to access this area of my web site.

This morning, I uploaded 10 articles (4 from Denise Brusveen, Sauk County and 6 of my own) in MS Word format that can be dowloaded and formatted for inclusion in your county newsletters.  That should be enough to get everyone started. Please feel free to edit these articles as you wish to fit your newsletter space requirements. I will let you know when I upload additional Repro Redux Articles via the Dairy Team News.

Please feel free to email me and let me know what you think of the content thus far, or if you have any reproduction-related information that you think deserves an article. If you would like to contribue a reproduction article for this series, send it to me via email.

In an effort to keep everyone apprised of the latest reproduction research going on in the UW Dairy Science Department, two abstracts that will be presented at the National American Dairy Science Association meetings in Montreal, Canada from June 12 - 16, 2009 have been uploaded to the Dairy Cattle Reproduction web page. Both abstracts involve Double-Ovsynch and will be presented by Julio Giordano, a PhD student working with Drs. Fricke and Wiltbank in the Dairy Science Department. The abstracts can be downloaded as pdf files from the "Staff Resources" page. You will have to log in with your UWEX netid and password to access this page. Please contact Paul Fricke if you have any questions regarding these abstracts.