Farm Animal

Bull Breeding Soundness
Ensuring your bull is in good working order is a crucial part of supporting your overall herd's fertility and establishing a tight calving period.

Bulls may be tested as part of a pre-purchase examination or after a period of rest before the breeding season begins. Making sure your bull is fit for breeding can also save you money when insuring your bull.

Bulls undergo a full clinical examination as well as a semen quality examination.

Fertility
As well as ultrasound scanning your cows for pregnancy and advice on effective synchronisation programmes, our farm vets are available to help with all aspects of fertility, from nutrition, to bull and heifer selection.

Beef Herd Health planning
Through discussion and assessment of current herd management and data, we aim to provide a useful herd health plan to enable your herd to thrive. The plan complies with the requirements outlined by Red tractor and FAWL as well as assessing your antibiotic usage.

By evaluating past performance and planning ahead for the future through we can prevent the risk of diseases to you animals and maximise your farms potential.

Disease Surveillance And Health Schemes
These schemes are carried out in conjunction with specialist veterinary laboratories to certify disease-free herds. Regular samples are taken from a selection of animals in the herd and tested at CHeCS-accredited laboratories. By achieving Certified Health Status, herds will have a higher standard of health, and animals will have added value when sold on for breeding purposes.

Proper hoof care is essential for animal welfare and to prevent lameness. Lameness not only causes pain and discomfort to animals but also results in significant financial losses for farmers.

Sulwyn Jenkins and Andrew Tyler are both Level 4 accredited cattle hoof trimmers. Our collaboration between vets and trimmers has led to increased communication and daily discussions about lameness. We also have a team of Vet techs who offer mobility scoring to aid in early identification of lame cows as well as blitz treatments for digital dermatitis.

Together our trimmers, vets and vet techs can make a bespoke plan tailored to the needs of your herd, whatever its size, and ensure that your animals receive the highest level of care.

Prioritise hoof health, and watch your livestock thrive!

Lambing
Our large animal premises are equipped with indoor lambing facilities and a surgical area for caesarean sections. The site boasts a large parking area enabling easy access for clients with trailers.

Flock Health Planning
An important part of your flock's performance is based on evaluating past performance and planning for the upcoming year. Advice on vaccinations and worming is important in controlling disease and preventing resistance on your farm. Our flock health plans comply with Red Tractor and FAWL requirements.

Evaluation of antibiotics usage using an antibiotic calculator helps you to benchmark your flock with others farms and identify areas of improvement.

We carry out in-house worm egg counts, and can advise on better targeted treatment options, which offer significant savings on time and wormer costs.

Ram Fertility Testing
Our vets recommend that rams are evaluated for semen quality and breeding soundness before the breeding season. Although it is rare for them to be completely infertile, sub-fertility is a common finding.

Vasectomies can be performed on rams, and by using these rams as teasers, a tighter lambing season can be achieved.

Faecal Egg Counting And Worming
Alpacas and llamas are sensitive to many gastrointestinal parasites. It is recommended to have a faecal egg count done on a routine basis (at least twice a year, depending on your farm) to use as a guide for worming. We offer a laboratory service dedicated to camelids to monitor parasite levels and advise about worming treatments and pasture management. Please call us before bringing samples to the practice so that we can advise you on taking samples correctly as this depends on the size of your herd.

Vaccinations
Camelids should be regularly vaccinated against clostridial diseases, which can cause sudden death. Our vets can help you choose the right vaccine and advise about the correct vaccination protocol to make sure all animals are well covered.

Castrations
Male camelids that are not kept for breeding should be castrated from about 18 months of age. We have good facilities to perform castrations at our surgery on Parc Teifi in Cardigan, or we can come to your farm if preferred.

Training Courses
We provide training courses to help small holders to develop all skills to look after alpacas and llamas.

Herd Health Planning
With a herd health plan we can provide written advice specifically tailored to your farm or smallholding. The herd health plan covers all aspects of preventative medicine (management, endo and ecto-parasite control, nutrition, body condition scoring, vaccination and biosecurity) in addition to advice on any specific issues that you might have in your herd.

A number of our vets have completed specialist training courses on chickens and are happy to advise on all aspects of chicken health and husbandry.