Bull insurance: Young bull management key for avoiding injury, empty cows

An Elders Insurance boss and a vet share key strategies for managing injury among sexually inexperienced bulls — and avoiding empty cows.

A rise in bull prices is pushing more producers to insure their new sires this autumn.

While insurance will rebate the bull outlay, key industry figures say the greatest cost of bull failure is empty cows.

For this reason, they are urging producers to focus on management of young bulls once they reach their new home — a critical way to protect the investment in genetics.

Elders Insurance Hume chief executive Tom Last said his company was insuring more and more bulls as the average bull replacement cost had almost doubled in price.

As a result, he had experienced record stud stock policies written in 2021.

Most claims, he said, come from younger bulls which were becoming injured during their first joining.

“Partially this is lack of sexual experience and lack of on-farm management, so the younger sires get injured,” Mr Last said.

“But the higher claim rate for young bulls is also due to the fact that many producers only elect to insure their bulls for the first six or twelve months.

“Some claims are due to pure bad luck, but we tend to see bigger operators, who do multi sire joinings, have a higher-than-average claim rate.

“And while insurance will replace your financial loss, the worst thing that can happen is that the bull breaks down and you miss a cycle and can have 30-40 cows or heifers which are empty, and therefore a loss of production cost which is enormous.”

Cattle veterinarian Craig Wood from APIAM animal health at Terang and Mortlake said while insurance was valuable, management was key for young bulls to decrease the chances of injury.

“If we are doing any more insurance claims, it is because more people are insuring bulls,” Dr Wood said.

“What is important is for producers to do a soundness check prior to joining on all the bulls they have, including semen mobility and morphology, to make sure they will do the job.”

Dr Wood said prospective buyers could ask if their genetics suppliers were signed up to BullCheck, a standardised accreditation scheme which assessed soundness and fertility developed by the Australian Cattle Veterinarians.

Rennylea Angus at Culcairn, NSW, will sell about 140 bulls at its annual sale next month and principal Lucinda Corrigan said insurance was important but did not take the place of sound management.

“We give a lot of advice on how to manage and acclimatise young bulls when they go to their new home and devote two pages of our bull sale catalogue to it,” Mrs Corrigan said.

“We can’t manage our clients’ places, but we can give that advice and some of the things we recommend include putting the new bull in with a group of non-cycling females and checking the young bulls every two days in their first joining.

“If you pull out a bull as soon as you see an injury, then there is a chance that it can be fixed.”