A WHOLE NEW WAY TO MANAGE COWS

NWF Feed Specialist John Cann believes many dairy farmers could improve herd profitability by taking a longer term view of herd performance. 

How do you measure success and performance in your dairy herd?  Seems a simple question, but measure the wrong things and you might make changes to management which don’t really tackle the root cause of any problem.

One of the biggest problems in the industry today is that most measures look at short term issues.  Dairy costings are usually based on 12 month rolling figures and management accounts certainly look at a 12 month window.

None of these approaches actually tells you anything about how much the cows in your herd contribute to the business during their lifetime, and surely this is the most important measure? 

On all farms the aim should be to get an animal productive as soon as possible by calving her into the herd close to two years old, to keep her as long as possible by reducing culling rate and to maximise the yield of saleable milk while she is in the herd.  Factors affecting how much a cow will contribute over her lifetime will include age at first calving, yield, calving interval, feed rate and culling rate.

To understand how profitable your cows are it is important to take a lifetime view, and this is exactly what the new NWF service Profit for Life does.  Based on simple inputs, information which will be readily available on all dairy farms, and some industry standard costs data it calculates:

·        When animals in your herd breakeven (where income matches rearing and production costs)

·        The average lifetime gross margin contribution.

It takes a cow in the UK around 1.4 lactations to cover all its rearing costs and actually begin to contribute to the farms profit yet recent work by DairyCo shows that 15% of heifers fail to complete their first lactation and so represent a huge financial loss to the business.  And on average cows in the UK have a lifetime contribution of approaching £1600.  However by addressing the lifetime management of the animal it is possible to increase the lifetime contribution by 40%.

So it can really pay to take a lifetime view on dairy cow performance and NWF Profit for Life is the first tool which allows you to do this.