Cows, calves and veterinary

Dairy Exporter May 2007, pg 103 Looking at herd testing statistics for the 2005/06 season shows a remarkable fact.

Bill Montgomerie goes on to explain that there are substantial differences otherwise between the breeds - percentage MS component of the milk, liveweight, protein/fat production. Income per cow is similar, feed efficiency of the crossbred slightly higher.

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Now if Jersey cows had been included, this discussion could have got really interesting.

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In the end, breed selection often comes down to personal preference (or what's available). I chose to farm crossbreds for their hybrid vigour (which in itself has a positive effect on health, production and fertility), medium size for less pasture damage / maintenance feed requirement, and high milksolids component.

Most of my farming experience has been with Friesian cattle, and my first calves came from one of those farms (Kat's Delight is the three year old pictured above).

The following year I was buying calves and was lucky to get a full line of crossbreds from a long-established crossbred herd. Number 50 (J12F4) pictured above is one of these, and she's a soppy dolt who stands at the end of the pit watching milking every day and has to be pushed aside every time the gate is opened.

The following year I again asked for crossbred calves but what the stock agent came up with was Jerseys, with a few crossbreds in amongst. Meantime, LIC has created a brand new breed called Kiwicross, capturing the benefits of the crossbreed, to either move towards a pure, true-breeding animal, add a modicum of hybrid vigour to the herd or gain the advantages of the crossbred without the calving difficulty associated with crossing large bulls over small cows.

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When buying cows, again I was looking for crossbreds but with limited time ended up buying a line of Jerseys and Jersey crosses at a herd dispersal three weeks before the start of the new season.

The few cows I added later were also Jerseys.

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As a consequence, there's a complete mix of all three (both) breeds in my herd; from pure Friesian to pure Jersey and everything in between. My plan for the future is to keep it that way, while introducing a third breed to maintain hybrid vigour.

I chose Brown Swiss to use across the first crosses, because the indexes for everything that's not Jersey/Friesian are pathetic whichever breed you choose and Brown Swiss is a breed I've worked with before. They have very good temperament, high protein components, are hardy, dual-purpose and strong feet and legs. The bull I used last year has a BW of zero.

Crossbreds that are less than a quarter of any one breed can be bred back to that breed without much loss of hybrid vigour. My breeding plan is basically - Friesian (10/16 or over) crossed to Jersey, Jersey (10/16 or over) to Friesian, first cross to Brown Swiss and all first-calvers and very petite cows to Jersey.

The primary aim is to maximise hybrid vigour while minimising calving difficulty.

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Because every farmer has a different aim in his breeding program, no single policy will suit everyone, any more than any one breed meets every farmer's criteria. For me, hybrid vigour supersedes BW and dairy type supercedes production figures (most of the bulls marketed have production figures far exceeding the average cow, so it's not something I select strongly on since the AB company has already dropped out the non-performers where production is concerned).

Since my programme effectively matches individual cows to individual bulls, it's also more complex than most farmers would choose.

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This is the first year I'd worked with Jerseys, and so far as the best of them go, you couldn't find a nicer cow. Having heard bad things about their temperament (not true in my herd), I'm now completely happy to maintain the very light reds and browns that currently dominate the herd by continuing to breed pure-breds each year. It's also said that they're harder to rear to maturity, no doubt I'll discover the truth or otherwise of that in time.

It's also an advantage to keep a few pure Friesians for those magnificent first-cross animals (without any worry about calving difficulty) and to flush the milking plant out at the end of milking... every herd needs those. (Interestingly enough, I do have a Friesian who consistently stands in the last place every milking). With only 12 Friesians in the whole herd (nine of the original calves plus one pure for every line of heifers '04 through '06) it's anyone's guess where those Friesians are going to come from.

Older farmers have consistently told me that the first cross is a magnificent animal but the later crosses (3/4 bred) are useless (in comparison). By three-way crossing, I hope to capitalise on the potential of hybrid vigour.

I suspect the complexity of the system and the low indexes of the non-dominant breeds are the main reason why few farmers use three-way crossing. I worked briefly with a herd that successfully used Ayshire as a third cross.

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On the other hand, having been catching up with the outputs of agrijournalism it has come to my attention that people no longer require food for survival.

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He's not the only person who said this in the latest crop of journalism, but Mick Keogh gets the latest 'stupid quote of the day' prize:

The second was that the world needed food - no longer true.

Glenys Christian no doubt had good reason for inserting scare quotes around the word "myths".

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First person to devise a plan for survival without food gets cyber chocolate (note, it's not allowed to involve I/V infusion of energy substances created in a laboratory; that counts as food).

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To put a bit more context to that quote, Keogh's point was that people are buying not just commodities, but value-added products. He walks into an affluent super-market and discovers that they offer customers a choice from thirty-two types of eggs and a dozen types of milk.

The lucrative markets have moved on from "food", interpreted as the basic, commodity item. Affluent people, he tells us, are not buying food based on their need to survive - they buy for taste, brand, ethics, nutritional and health-giving properties.

Coupled with this is the increase in food production by developing countries. What Keogh is commenting on is a change in the balance of the market, not (as a brief glance at the article might have suggested) that humanity has made a biological breakthrough and can now survive without nutritional input. Rather, humanity is more fussy about that nutritional input and that creates niche markets which producers can anticipate, recognise, and supply for.

Simply supplying a product for its intrinsic value and expecting it to be welcomed in the market isn't good enough any more (I disagree with this part of the statement, but my disagreement is no part of the point he was making*).

Value-add is the way of the future.

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*My disagreement is based on two things - firstly, this argument is tailored to a world full of affluent people with access to supermarkets, which supermarkets have access to a wide range of niche products.

This doesn't represent so much as a majority of the world's population.

Even in supposedly 'affluent' countries there are large numbers of people struggling to survive on the income they can bring home. Perhaps they would like to partake of the array of value-add products - they can't. Their immediate need is for 'food' - the low-priced commodity products they are able to afford.

While people *are* starving the basic nutritional value of commodity food cannot be over-looked.

As milk producers, our product is marketed across nations, across classes and affluence bands. So colostrum pills are reaching the upper classes and milk powder is carried to the homes of the lower income families. Financially it isn't helpful to market to the affluent and ignore the poor, ethically it isn't helpful. And suggesting that the world, as a whole, has no need of 'food' as a cheap, commodity product simply isn't true.

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My second point of disagreement was simply that too large a move away from the production of a basic nutritionally sound product into niche markets depends on the whole infrastructure remaining in place, affluence increasing etc.

Effectively, it depends on peace-time and content.

We don't have that.

The above photo was taken about a week ago.

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The cows have been on once a day milking since the end of April when the grazing rotation reached the back of the farm again - much too far to walk twice a day :-)

The milk dropped over the next few days by a third (to a low of just over 5 litres a cow from eight litres) and the cell count doubled - to around 320,000 SCCml. Around the same time I walked through the herd to establish a condition score for each individual - there were only three dry cows at the time; and 113 cows on farm total. They averaged a CS over 4.5 with only four cows below 4 and ten cows over 5.5.

After around a week the SCC dropped back to 260,000, and it took a further fortnight to find the culprit covering the filter with tiny clots every milking and dry her off (mystery of the season solved! It was only luck that she happened to drop one large clot - which I saw - in her foremilk the third time I checked the whole herd. She passed a mastitis test and produced clear fore-milk over the next few days, but with her milked seperately, the filter was magically staying clean. That's the only way I can be sure it was her.) The cell count since has dropped back to 230,000 and the milk per cow is up to over 6 litres, or 0.7 kg MS per cow per day.

On the 11 May I dried off the earliest calvers, the bitches and the low producer/high SCC cows leaving 88 milkers, two of which were occupied feeding calves.

This allowed the rotation to be extended to about a sixty-two day round across the whole farm, forty-six days across the area not set aside for winter. With warm weather, heavy dews and very little rain, the region has seen phenomenal late autumn growth rates of 45 kgDM/ha/day - faster than the cows can eat it.

As a consequence, the cows have been well fed and the average condition score now is probably 4.8/4.9 - I walked through the herd again two days ago to pick out which cows would need additional feed through June. Pasture cover continues to increase, and the milkers can carry on producing until the end of the month. A few cows have dried themselves off, and been turfed into the dry herd the same day.

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On dry-off date, the earliest calvers that are still milking will be due 7 - 8 weeks later. Not an especially long winter holiday for either me or the cows, since no doubt a few prematures will have calving and milk production well underway by mid-July, but just long enough.

The cull cows left on the 22 April and seven young empty cows were sold the previous week, destocking the farm to allow the grazing rotation to be extended while still fully feeding the cows.

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Still on-farm are four October calvers that are marked for sale - no doubt my phone will ring sooner or later and the stock agent will tell me there's a truck coming for them. If it doesn't happen it's no big concern. I'm going into winter with a very high stocking rate - the heifers are due home next week and since I haven't heard that the stock agent up north has managed to sell the two empties, I expect all 47 will arrive, bringing the numbers up to 160 cows on 45 ha effective.

Way too high to be going into winter with except for the fact that practically none of the cows need to be fed for weight gain, hay is available through June and beyond, the pasture covers are good and I've left myself about 35 bales of haylage for the spring.

The two heifers can be culled at any time. If I reach spring still with those four late calvers in the herd and there haven't been empties/slips show up I can consider selective culling of poor performers that have already calved. Regardless, I've set a stocking rate considerably higher (but for a smaller-sized cow) than the farm has carried this year and management through spring will reflect that - they'll come out of winter trained to graze to a low level and will be expected to continue cleaning out their paddocks. A tight spell through spring isn't inevitable - there are enough late calvers and the district is early and generally frost-free. The haylage is there for spring and early culling or early dry-off is the method of choice for reducing grazing pressure in the late summer and autumn.

I prefer not to use controlled starvation as a method of choice.

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With higher stocking rates, surplus cut for silage has to be a true surplus, otherwise it's milk taken out of the vat in spring and added back at a far higher cost in autumn. If there is no room to cut silage at all, then there's no room for it - autumn management then will require buying in feed or de-stocking. I'm not a great fan of setting goals to cut x amount of silage and x amount of hay during the season, as this removes the flexibility needed for good pasture management.

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The last farm I managed calved 143 Friesian cows onto 36 hectares through the spring. It was a controlled starvation farm. I made no silage (apparently I also did a record peak daily production at 19 litres per cow, at a time when there would normally have been silage set a side). 100 bales of mediocre silage were fed out - half through spring and half through autumn - and the cows coped through a combination of immediate culling (March) of diagnosed empties, picking out the duds (5 of them) and refusing to milk them to the vat until the boss finally weaned all his calves and allowed them to be culled, once a day milking of every cow that failed the system (got sick) or needed to gain weight in the autumn, and early dry-off of selected cows. Religiously back-fencing to maximise pasture production. Splitting out herds for separate management as needed.

Rigorous attention to detail and maximising pasture growth are essential in a high stocking system. The farm described above had pushed high-stocking too far. (Though I'm going to throw out here the production figure of 1300kgMS/ha for an input of 1.5T urea, 100 bales of silage and bare-maintenance off-farm grazing for dry cows (five - ten weeks - they come back as they calve, but early calvers may only be dry four weeks unless paying close attention) plus waste whey-product spread from late summer onwards).

It's not only pasture management that needs the attention to detail - utilising once a day milking is only possible if the resultant increase in SCC can be absorbed. If mastitis management is under par, a move to less frequent milkings is likely to cause financial penalties as the SCC increases above dairy company thresholds.

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A similar stocking rate, but with a smaller-sized cow (crossbreds) was a far different farming experience. The cows were still pushed hard, and rarely achieved the sought-after CS5, but the peak per cow was higher and for at least part of the year the cows could be fully fed while a true surplus of silage was cut. (produced 11-1200kgMS/ha in the years I was there)

Waikato farms apparently run at a far higher stocking rate than Taranaki and further south - next year I'm aiming for 3.4 cows/ha on an all-grass system with a predominantly Jersey herd. Both the above farms were 3.8 - 4, and larger cows per hectare.

The question is still open as to whether this reflects higher grass growth rates on Waikato farms, or simply the acceptance of skinnier cows and emphasis on production per hectare rather than per cow.

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Final production for the year is expected to be 43,000kg MS - slightly under 1,000 per ha and over 300 kgMS per cow (we hit the 300 barrier about the same time we went on once a day, so without reaching for a calculator, the cows that are milking through this month will probably have averaged 320 kg MS each. Around half of them are still heifers.)

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Planned winter management - there were 21 cows considered to be either under or bordering a condition score of 4.5. Minus two of them which are late calvers, these cows will be run along with the heifers through the month of June. The remainder of the herd need little more than maintenance - 8 kgDM/day, or four+ hours grazing. My experience suggests that if they're not actually eating down to ground level or trampling everything into mud, dry cows can usually gain a half condition score before calving without trying very hard. The majority of this herd are already at CS 5 or above and the remainder need to gain less than half a condition score to get there.

For the heifers/weight gain herd, I'll be playing around with their feed a little to see how much they can actually eat. They're still expected to clean up their pastures, and from memory I suspect they should be grazing 6 - 8 hours a day to do so, and put on weight as well. The heifers don't need to gain weight, but they do need to be well-fed to allow for their continued growth and because they're not yet accustomed to competing for feed and water with a large herd of hungry cows. I'd probably start by offering 9 - 9.5 kgDM/day and adjust up or down to a level where they can both clean up the pasture and graze for at least six hours a day.

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Before calving (early July) the herds will be re-adjusted, with a springers herd created and the rest of the dry cows in one herd.

Again, this will depend on the area of the farm at which the cows are at, whether or not every cow has reached CS 5, and whether or not there is enough calving area to have a large springers herd, or if it should be a small one (the heifers could stay with it, if the former).

Last year the dry cows following their consecutive rotation reached the gully towards the back of the farm just as the planned start of calving date came round. Since allowing cows to calve on the other side of the gully sounded like a Very Bad Idea (for the double reason of not wanting to cart calves all the way home and not wanting to have to climb down into the gully in search of missing calves), the Springer mob was created at this stage and grazed on sheltered paddocks this side of the gully. Drafting close-to-calving cows was done twice a week, and nearly always done in the race or at the shed since every time I started drafting them in the paddock and got the first few out of the gate the whole herd would decide they were going somewhere while I was trying to sneak around the next selected cow :-) Should try drafting eight cows through the gate out of a herd of 140 dries, on your own, without extra reels - it's great fun.

Hence, drafting turned into 'follow them down the race and let all the ones you don't want fall back behind' until we reach the shed or a gate across the race, at which stage there's probably about thirty left (and I still want to separate 8 of those) and we can play at 'walking in circles and peeling off the edge of the spiral' until the ones that haven't come out of the group and started off down the race back to their paddock are the eight originally selected (of which, if you recall, five had already been separated before the whole herd decided to go walkabout) at which point I turn and run ahead of them to open the gate into the Springing mob while they try to catch up under the delusion that the fun's over and it's time to go back to the paddock with the dries.

Investing in a portable water trough could help reduce both backgrazing and pugging this winter, but only partially, since even if there's no need for the cows to walk back to a trough the springer and colostrum herds still need daily access to the gate.

The gate access areas for last year's springer and colostrum herds are still rutted underfoot, as are all the areas that were grazed through the worst of that rain last June/July/August, in spite of re-drilling and rolling.

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* edited to place asterisks where every paragraph space that disappeared on publishing ought to be.