Improved reproductive technologies and management have enabled dairy herds to produce more female calves than they need. One emerging strategy is to select a subset of superior animals to produce the next generation of herd replacements while breeding the others for off-farm value (often to beef semen). It is complex to anticipate how today’s breeding choices will impact herd inventory three years from now and it is costly to wind up with too few replacements to keep the dairy herd full with the most productive cows.

We created the SemenSolver spreadsheet as a tool to guide week-by-week semen choices, customized for a specific farm, to capitalize on crossbred beef markets while maintaining the replacement supply to support herd size and performance.

Factsheet can be found here.