Lloyd and Daphne Holterman are partners in Rosy-Lane Holsteins, a 1,000 cow farm in Wisconsin in the American mid-west.

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 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. This formula may change in the future and has changed in the past few years to hasten the transfer of assets and stock.

Antibiotics

The farm hasn’t used an antibiotic treatment in the milking herd for over five years. The farm isn’t organic, nor is it getting a higher milk price – it just doesn’t use drugs in lactating cows.

Lloyd said that the original goal was to use antibiotics on less than 0.5% of the herd, have found they actually don’t need to use any.

This hasn’t impacted on performance, in 2017 they had a 3.3% death rate in adult cows. Their target is to get this less than 3%. Both are well below the average for confinement dairies in the US and the herd's average days in milk 153 days, well ahead of the farm’s target of 170 days.

Calves

Lloyd says the farm's calving approach is vital as 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 said let’s give it a try. Basically, you don’t intervene in the calving process, you just let the cow do her thing.” Lloyd said.

The results have been impressive, with less metritis in cows and fewer problems with calves. The mortality rate at calving is 3.8%.

Another thing they practice is 'just in time' calving. Cows due to calve are kept in a close-up pen which is checked 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 that 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 as Lloyd doesn't want to push body condition score on to cows.

Read more

In pictures: Dairy Day 2018