A dairy cow's breeding calendar: from insemination to drying off and calving

The key dates in a dairy cow's reproductive cycle: heat, insemination, pregnancy check, drying off and calving, and how to keep track of them across the whole herd without a calendar on the wall.

In a dairy barn everything revolves around calving: it drives the lactation, the milk yield and whether a cow pays her way. A missed heat costs three weeks, and a cow dried off too late or too early starts her next lactation worse. With a handful of cows you can keep it in your head. With dozens, you can't.

The key dates in the cycle

• Voluntary waiting period: cows are usually not inseminated sooner than 40–60 days after calving, so the uterus has time to recover.
• Heat: comes back on average every 21 days. If a cow doesn't settle after insemination, that's when to watch for her next heat.
• Pregnancy check: an ultrasound can confirm pregnancy from around 28–35 days after insemination, a manual check a little later.
• Drying off: cows are usually dried off around 60 days before the expected calving, or shorter in agreement with your vet.
• Calving: gestation lasts on average around 280–285 days, just over nine months from a successful insemination.

The goal: one calf a year

Many farms aim for a calving interval close to a year. To get there, a cow needs to get in calf within roughly three months of calving. Every missed heat or late-spotted empty cow pushes the next calving back and shortens the time when she gives the most milk.

Where things usually slip

• The insemination date is written on a slip of paper that gets lost, so nobody knows when to check for pregnancy.
• No one watches the cow 21 days after insemination, so a repeat heat goes unnoticed.
• The drying-off date is worked out from memory, sometimes weeks too late.
• Straws in the tank are counted by eye, and then the bull you need has run out.

How AgroDuty handles it

In AgroDuty you log the insemination by the cow, even with no signal, and her card shows the whole breeding history at a glance: inseminations, calvings and a status such as "Pregnant" or "Calved". The app reminds you about pregnancy checks and drying-off dates, and every herd event sits in one calendar. The straw used for an insemination is deducted from your semen store automatically, so the tank count is always right.

Your whole farm in one app

Barn, fields, garage and finances on one phone. Get AgroDuty and leave the notebook in the drawer.