SEEDSTOCK COUNCIL MEETING
2003 Cattle Industry Annual Convention & Trade Show – Nashville, Tennessee
Thursday, January 30, 2003

Sponsored by: American Livestock/Harding and Harding Insurance Company

Synchronization Planning – Iowa Beef Center Sync Planner
Daryl Strohbehn, Ph.D., Iowa State University
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Iowa Beef Center Offers Synchronization Planner

With so many synchronization programs, each with its own schedule, it can get pretty confusing as to which day cattlemen are supposed to start feeding, stop feeding, give the shot our pull out the insert. The Iowa Beef Center is providing cattlemen a Web-based service that will allow them to input a desired breeding date and get a calendar scheduling all activities of the protocol.
Darryl Strohbehn, beef Extension specialist, described the Iowa Beef Center Synch Planner during the Seedstock Council Meeting Jan. 30 at the 2003 Cattle Industry Convention and Trade Show. The session was sponsored by American Live Stock Insurance Co.
A few years ago, producers started complaining about how hard it was to get everything done on the right day, and that was limiting success with synchronization programs. Strohbehn, with the assistance of Mark Dikeman, put together an Excel spreadsheet that producers could use to schedule complete programs from the outset.
At it’s simplest, producers can enter the day they want to start breeding cows and select the synchronization protocol they want to use. Thirteen protocols are currently available and three more are in the works. The program will return to the producer a calendar of activities with the date of each synchronization step, the day of the week each step should be completed and a description of each synchronization step.
If producers want to go more into more depth, they can include information that will provide a cost analysis and cost sensitivity analysis with varying reproductive rates.
The most popular feature, Strohbehn says, is the Barn Calendar, which provides a typical monthly calendar detailing daily tasks. The Synch Planner is available at http://www.iowabeefcenter.com.

-- by Shauna Rose Hermel