DEAR SIR: It is always important to look for ways in which farmers can reduce production costs, and particularly during the current financially challenging times. It is also important to realise that there is a distinct difference between cost-cutting and cost-saving.

Genuine cost-saving measures do not compromise the health and welfare of the farmer or the animals, or the quality of the end product. All of these can suffer, however, when the focus is on cutting costs without due regard to the wider effects on farm economics.

I refer to an article in the Irish Farmers Journal of 30 April, which looked at costs that dairy farmers could do without. One suggestion was to stop milk recording. Cutting out milk recording may have the potential to save €11 per cow, but the CostCheck calculator clearly shows that reducing the herd SCC from 250,000 to 150,000 cells/ml has the potential to increase farm profit by €72/cow, even at a milk price of 23c/l.

However, in order to make the right management decisions to achieve this SCC reduction, the farmer needs to have access to the type of high-quality individual cow information which can be provided by milk recording.

Other suggestions in the same article, such as culling chronic SCC cows or only treating selected cows with antibiotic dry cow therapy are feasible, cost-effective practices – but only when you have milk recording information that can direct these decisions. Rather than cutting out milk recording, farmers should instead ask how they can maximise the value from it.

By working with their vets, or co-op or farm advisers, and by using milk recording information to help continually reduce the SCC of their herds, farmers can ensure that the costs of milk recording are repaid many times over.