The audience at Dairy Day was told how to make sure they never run out of silage again.

Getting higher yields of silage and matching stocking rate with grass grown were the key messages from this session at the Skills Hub.

Richie O’Brien is the coordinator of the Teagasc/Glanbia joint programme and he spoke about the importance of feeding the silage crop.

“Dairy and livestock farmers need to think more like tillage farmers do when it comes to growing silage. If a tillage farmer is growing a crop of barley, they will give it all the nutrients and care it needs for a high yield. If more farmers treated silage like a crop then yields might be higher,” Richie said.

He said a high-yielding crop of first-cut silage needs three bags/acre of 0:7:30 and 100 units/acre of nitrogen, either in the form of urea or CAN and ideally with sulphur. Second-cut silage needs 2.5 bags/acre of 0:7:30 and 80 units/acre of nitrogen.

He said the value of slurry is often overrated, particularly when it is coming from lagoons or open yards.

“There’s a big difference in the nutrient value of thick versus very dilute slurry. About 3,500 gallons/acre of thick slurry would want to be spread before first cut to replace the 0:7:30 and 2,500 gallons/acre of slurry should be spread for second cut. In general terms, 1,000 gallons/acre of typical slurry is about equivalent to half a bag/acre of 0:7:30,” he said.

“Building up soil fertility should be looked at after the second cut, as too much potash spread before harvesting will end up in the silage and can cause metabolic problems for the cow. The best time to build up soil fertility is the autumn.

“But on dedicated silage fields, if the focus is on feeding the crop, it doesn’t really matter a whole lot if the field is at index one or two.”

He said feeding the crop will help to manage supply, but that stocking rate determines demand and to make sure you never run out of silage the two need to be in balance.

“Even where 800kg of meal is being fed per cow, the farm needs to be growing 15t/ha if the farm is stocked at 2.7 cows/ha. Even at 2.5 cows/ha the farm needs to be growing 14t/ha,’’ Richie said.

Tactics when feed and cash is tight

Dairy adviser Stephen Connolly gave some practical advice at Dairy Day for when feed and cash is tight. Stephen said there are two ways of looking at a feed and cash deficit:

“There are short- and long-term strategies to dealing with both. In terms of managing a feed shortage, in the short term I would target feed at dry cows that need it most. This involves body condition scoring [BCS] cows and grouping them based on their condition score and restricting silage to those that are now at the target BCS for calving.

“With reasonable quality silage, these cows at BCS 3.25 need to only be fed 10kg dry matter per day, not the 12kg or 13kg that they would eat if unrestricted.

‘‘With cows in better BCS than normal this year, there is a really good opportunity to save on silage over the dry period. This will help to save silage, but it will also reduce the risks of overfat cows next spring, which are as big a problem as cows that are too thin,” Stephen said.

In terms of long-term strategies to save on feed, he said that more emphasis should be placed on the maintenance sub index in the EBI. In a demonstration with three cows with different EBIs for maintenance, Stephen demonstrated that the higher maintenance value cows will eat about 1.5t of dry matter less over their lifetime.

Using the same cows, he said that long-term cashflow problems can be eased by breeding cows that produce more fat and protein. One of the cows in the demonstration with a high predicted difference for fat and protein is expected to produce over 600kg of milk solids this year at a milk price of 44c/l, which is 12c/l above base milk price.

“That cow’s milk is worth €2,600 this year, whereas the cow with the low PD for fat and protein will produce milk worth €1,888 even though their milk volume isn’t that much different. Long term, breeding for higher solids is the best approach to prevent cashflow problems,” Stephen said.

Rosy-Lane Holsteins

Lloyd and Daphne Holterman are partners in Rosy-Lane Holsteins, a 1,000-cow farm in Wisconsin in the American MidWest. Lloyd explained that there are four people in the partnership – Tim Strobel, Jordan Matthews, Daphne and himself:

“Each partner gets a salary based on their work on the farm. Tim and Jordan’s salary is higher than Daphne’s and mine as they do day-to-day management, hands-on employee management and respond to emergencies. Each partner then gets a 4% return on the percentage of stock they own.

‘‘After that, the profits are split on an equal basis, ie 25% each way. This formula may change in the future and has changed in the past few years to hasten the transfer of assets and stock.”

The farm has not used an antibiotic treatment in the milking herd for over five years. The farm is not organic, nor is it getting a higher milk price – it just does not use drugs in lactating cows anymore.

Lloyd said that the original goal was to use antibiotics on less than 0.5% of the herd, but as they have relied less and less on antibiotics they actually don’t need to use any antibiotics. This has not affected performance.

In 2017, they had a 3.3% death rate in adult cows. Their target is to get this below 3%. Both are well below the average for confinement dairies in the US and the average days in milk in the herd is 153, beating the farm’s target to be less than 170 days in milk on average.

The Rosy-Lane approach to calf rearing is unique. Lloyd says healthy cows start off as healthy calves.

“A few years ago, one of our staff went off to do a course on calving and when they came back they wanted to implement this new policy that they had heard about, called ‘‘hands-free calving’’. I was very sceptical but I decided to give it a try. Basically, you don’t intervene in the calving process, you just let the cow do her thing,” Lloyd said.

If a calf is halfway out, the natural inclination is to go in and give it a pull to bring it out the rest of the way but this is no longer practised at Rosy-Lane. Cows are left to their own devices. The results have been impressive, with less metritis in cows and fewer problems with calves. The mortality rate at calving (dead on arrival) is 3.8%.

The other thing they practise is just-in-time calving. Cows due to calve are kept in a close-up pen, which is monitored every 45 minutes and cows close to calving are moved to a small calving pen. The target is that cows will spend no longer than eight hours labouring in this pen. They used to bed the newborn calf carrier in straw, but they now use a blanket and replace and wash the blanket after each use. Lloyd said blankets are cleaner with less chance for pathogen growth.

After calving, the cow is put back into the close-up pen where they re-socialise with other cows that they are familiar with. Lloyd says this reduces stress and they pop out the placenta much faster than if they moved to the fresh group straight away. Cows are fed a low-energy diet from drying off to calving. Lloyd said they don’t want to push body condition score on to cows.