Drying off right

Spring calving dairy farmers are drying off cows in large numbers this week and in the coming weeks. The key message to getting the job completed in the right way is to get your head lamp out so that you can see what you are doing and secondly get help. Don’t try and take it on yourself. Even if the other person doesn’t know anything about cows they can organise tubes, keep clean equipment in front of you and help move cows around. Don’t rush it – the best farmers will milk cows, go for breakfast and come back to the drying job. Fill one side of the parlour so you have room to organise your equipment and tubes on the other side. In terms of selective dry cow therapy you have to be very careful. You need to have very good information, not just on each cow but also on each quarter. If you don’t have it, then in my opinion, you are better to use dry cow tubes in all quarters and put a plan in place for next year to get better information.

Herd fertility

I was at the ICBF (20 year anniversary) conference on Wednesday and there was plenty of talk on genetics with some commentary that we have fertility sorted and now it’s time to focus on something else. Pat Dillon came out very strong that this commentary was wrong and that we still have a long way to go on improving fertility in the national herd. He said we have seven- to -ten years of strong selection on improving fertility and milk solids before we can take the selection pressure off this in the EBI index. Farmers considering selecting sires for spring 2019 now over the dry period and who were considering taking the pressure off using EBI, need to keep this in mind. Pat and Donagh Berry did say that there was still some changes that could be made on selecting better beef sires once you have bred enough replacements. The dairy beef index will help.

Milk quality

I also attended the Cellcheck milk quality awards last week. To get in the door and be one of the 500 farmers you needed to have an average cell count less than 72,000 cells/ml. Some farmers asked me afterwards if there is a benefit to having cell count this low. The fact of the matter is that the economic benefits, in terms of milk output, are probably very small to go any lower than 100,000. In some cases, it takes a lot of extra work on farm to deliver such low results. However, a lot of these farmers have adequate labour resources and they are right to put the resources into the parlour because they can get a good return. They use very low levels of antibiotics, they breed good cows and have very low culling rates due to somatic cell count (SCC).

Building

A lot of building work is ongoing – the investment will depend on what your business objective is, resources available (money, land etc) and labour availability. Dairy farmers often get side tracked on discussions about the number of units and technology to increase the efficiency within the parlour. Instead of efficiency, many farmers need to look at getting a proper collecting yard with a good backing gate and efficient drafting as herds get bigger.