Farm Animal Services

Shires Vets encourage our farms to have routine fertility visits, organised on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. We always aim to send the same vet and lay staff combination to ensure consistency. We run an InterHerd+ bureau for our regular visits, inputting your service and calving data to generate the lists of cows we wish to see each visit – this ensures that all cows are examined, and hopefully served, in a timely manner. Routine visits can include a member of lay staff to complete paperwork and assist which ensures accuracy and most importantly efficiency.

Shires Vets synchronise InterHerd+ with NMR and CIS to allow full access to your milk recording data and produce comprehensive farm reports. This more holistic approach to routine fertility work may help us to quickly identify any problems arising and, by acting quickly, help to reduce their impact.

Shires Vets believe that an ongoing full health plan is essential to realise a herd’s efficiency and productivity. Regular monitoring can be easily integrated into our routine fertility visits but if you have an area of herd or flock management you wish to improve then don’t hesitate to contact us. The annual health plan check is a good time to look at your targets for the year and highlight which areas you would like to concentrate on improving.

Shires Vets encourage routine blood or bulk milk sampling to monitor your disease status on farm (many of these can be performed on your TB test when all the cattle are being handled) and many of our clients are enrolled in eradication programs to remove disease from their farms such as Neospora, BVD and Johnes.

We believe strongly in the benefits of blood and faecal sampling to aid in diagnosis. Our on-site laboratory at Eccleshall allows us to have blood test results within minutes (even at weekends!). Shires also offer milk culturing for mastitis agent identification as well as lungworm, worm and cocci counts and identification of calf scour pathogens in-house.

Mastitis is still one of the ‘big 3’ problems that is encountered daily. Shires Vets can study your milk recording data to identify where the problem may be coming from and also which cows to focus on – we strongly believe that prevention is better than ‘fire-fighting’ these cases and that mastitis monitoring should be an integral part of a health plan.

We encourage the reduction of broad-spectrum antibiotics where possible and will help to identify cows that are candidates for a narrow spectrum dry cow tube or using teat sealant alone. This is a relatively new field for some clients but the results are encouraging - not only in reducing costs of drugs but more importantly reducing cases of E.Coli mastitis and general udder health.

Shires Vets are proud to have 3 fully trained DairyCo mastitis mentors who are qualified to perform full on-farm investigations should you need help with your SCC or clinical cases of mastitis.

It is estimated that each case of lameness can cost an average of £180; can you afford not to address this problem? In addition to being costly, lameness and locomotion scoring are becoming more important for assurance schemes. In addition to the treatment of individual cows we are well placed to be able to work with you to produce a herd prevention regime. Shires Vets have 2 DairyCo lameness mentors to carry out your on-farm investigations.

Unfortunately, in this area, TB is affecting many of our farms. We can work with you to try to reduce prevalence on the farm with efficient testing protocols and on-farm advice. All of our veterinary team perform TB testing but we also employ a dedicated TB tester who concentrates on this.

In addition to monitoring female fertility, Shires Vets offer a bull and a ram electro ejaculator which enable us to examine semen for motility. We recommend a full breeding soundness examination prior to your breeding season which can also be very useful when investigating cases of poor fertility in a herd.

Shires Vets aim to run a regular program of interesting and informative meetings throughout the year. These meetings are an opportunity to meet our team, learn more about our services and for us to share the latest research in farm animal care.

Shires Vets cover all of our own out of hours work and are always contactable in case of emergencies, whether for phone advice or on-farm assistance.

The Shires Vets practice base at Eccleshall (Link to Eccleshall branch) is our farm animal pharmacy in addition to hosting our farm animal health shop where we sell a range of dairy chemicals, wormers and minerals. If there is an item that you are looking for and cannot find please do ask as we may be able to order it in for you.

Shires Vets monthly newsletters and quarterly KPI comparisons with our farms help to keep you up to date with the latest news and information.

Newsletters are automatically sent with invoices and copies can also be found in the surgery. KPI comparisons are distributed in person on the farm during routine fertility visits. If you believe we have missed you please do let us know.