The final average (mean) empty rate for this season was 17%. The median was 14%. Many farmers have had an increase in their final empty rates this year and only a small number improving on last year. Repro performance is multifactorial and there is a lot that can be looked at with a good thorough investigation of MINDA data, as long as aged pregnancy testing has been done. Please chat to your vet if you would like to look at this in greater depth. A couple of potential contributing factors that have come up throughout these investigations this season are: insufficient bull power, heifer management (slow heifer calving spread and not reaching target liveweights) and sub-optimal BCS/nutrition. The graph above shows two 'target' lines - the red squares are the target lines as they were set in 2012 by what the top 25% of farmers were achieving (from fertility focus reports) and the green triangles were updated in 2017 after the large fertility study as what the top farmers were achieving then. You can see from the below graph that there is a general trend whereas mating length increases empty rate decreases. So any discussion about empty rate % must be accompanied by a discussion about mating length. It is unrealistic to expect an empty rate of 5% unless you are mating cows for upwards of 14 weeks.