Nearly two-thirds of the way to the cows' 'winter holidays'
The milking herd - all 62 of 'em.
Nearly fifteen years ago, I started my career working with a 50 - 60 cow AYR calving herd. We gave the dairy company around a thousand litres a day (20l per cow) most days, feeding grass and a home-mix barley meal (silage in winter).
The herd above is a bit different. A week ago it had ninety-four cows, just under two-thirds of the cows that calved last spring. Since early February, cows have been picked out for low yield, low condition, less than perfect health; dried off and grazed separately. A farm walk last Sunday suggested that the sensible thing to do would be to finish milking for the season with a couple of paddocks of longer grass left to feed dry cows.
The weather forecast said there would be rain in another week. The sensible option was still: dry off the whole herd on Thursday 27th, because the cows are too light and there isn't enough grass to feed them a milking ration. Another two options came to mind - carry on milking till Sunday and take the risk of grazing the extra two paddocks (leaving nothing ahead). Or modify that risk by drying off the lightest cows and carrying on with a small herd on the remaining long grass and supplement. If the rain doesn't come the remainder could be dried off the following week with no great loss in pasture cover or cow condition (but all the supplement used up).
As can be seen from the image above, I didn't swing with the 'sensible option'.
Thirty light cows (under condition score four) were dried on Thursday. In theory the remaining cows are the best in the herd - but in fact, I suspect the ones dried off last week are equally good. The difference is that while the ones I dried last Thursday milk well at the expense of condition (all low yielders had been turfed out of the milking herd on the 15 March, if not earlier), the ones that are still milking manage to look after themselves as well as produce milk.
An F8J8 heifer. There are a few heifers still in the milking herd, the high flyers that have managed to milk well and hang on to a reasonable covering of body fat.
Number 115 - a Jersey heifer.
When the herd test data is sorted by production, the cows with more Friesian breeding inevitably come out on top, with very few Jerseys able to hold their own against the larger black&whites (or the big black crossbreds). Being tight for grass all season, I've been running the lower yielders on once a day in a separate herd and then drying cows as the grass got too short to maintain the whole group milking. In both cases, the herd separated out for the lower feeding level was almost 100% Jersey, with the poorer crossbred cows only being drafted from the main herd some time later.
The effect of once a day milking and a lower feeding level has to be acknowledged here - I've managed the cows this season to give the better yielders the chance to produce near their potential while compromising the ability of the younger and poorer milkers to achieve as much as they could have done. The production of a Jersey heifer put on once a day milking in December then dried off in February cannot be compared to that of an older, larger cow wellfed and milked twice daily until February, then once daily for as long as the season lasts. Even when both animals remain under the same management system, a straight comparison isn't possible because the larger cow has an inherent ability to eat more (and graze more aggresively) and produce more milk. The only meaningful comparison is an efficiency one, comparing food in with the cow's liveweight and milk out.
The only way to obtain such data is in a controlled feeding system where it is possible to measure the input/outputs, meaning that in a commercial herd a farmer can't do much more than guess how efficient an individual cow is compared to her herdmates.
I suspect my herd is around 50% Jersey cows with the remainder crossbred and a handful of Friesians. The milking herd right now looks to be around 30% pure Jersey and is dominated by large black, and black and white cows. Those Jersey cows that have held their own so far through the drought are an impressive group.
115 isn't a brilliant producer, but she's well-conditioned and has thus far managed to hold her milk well above the cut-off points for being turfed into the dry herd. She's been milked once-daily since December, and is a fence pusher. The other Jersey heifer that is stil in the milking herd, oddly enough, was also a fence pusher - you know, those animals that are always in the next paddock over when you go to fetch them until you finally find where the 'hot' connection is broken.
Here she displays her technique of staying out of the dry herd - agressive feeding.
The dry herd, on a gorgeous droughty Taranaki day. Note the condition score - it's not pretty (though the harsh light and angle does exaggerate it).
These cows will need well fed through the autumn and winter to recover condition before calving in mid-July. Photo taken nine days ago.
Below is the milking herd in April last year (there were only three dry cows at that stage). Again, check out the condition score. Last year I dried the herd off at the end of May at just under CS 5.
Into the dry: Take Two
Unsurprisingly, the reprieve (16 mm rain one weekend, 12 the following) was short-lived and has simply given grass growth a sufficient boost to get us back to where we were before we grazed all the grass on the last round.
I'm now telling everyone who'll listen that there ain't gonna be an autumn flush this year - you only have to look at the ground to see that the weather forecast's got to be a lot less bright and sunny if the green stuff is gonna keep green.
A drive off the farm suggests that all the other farmers knew before me :(
Spoke to a friend from the Waikato earlier, and learned that feed-out exhaustion has set in up there and there's no grass to speak of.
There was good news? No, it was bad news. 62 was diagnosed MT today.
Plus two young Jerseys who will find homes with a kind farmer prepared to give them another chance to get in calf :-) - if he's quick enough, he can get them in milk and put a wee calf with each.
And that was it. Including the MT eczema cull that went in February, 4 cows out of 155 were not in-calf at the end of 14 weeks mating - 151 apparently are/were.
If every year was like this farmers wouldn't be spending hours raising pretty heifer calves every spring (and thousands on grazing fees).
*should note here that the mating opportunity was actually between 17 - 18 weeks, just that almost nothing cycled and the bull failed to get in calf those that did.
Cows ambush tractor
P - if you check in: the first four images above are re-sized, one file away from the original. The one immediately above is uploaded from the original file (2.3 Mb), directly from the camera - the quality difference is obvious to me (see below) but I don't usually do this because it takes around half an hour to upload, if it doesn't actually fail.
What do you think of the quality loss? I could send you images to play with, if you can cope with files of that size. I can make .tiff files in Paint, though I haven't tried it (file size) but they come straight off the camera as .jpegs and I'm not sure if I can change that. As far as I know, if I've got a .jpeg original file there's not much editing I can do (printing questionable) while retaining max quality.
MT cow and number games
62 was ten years old last spring, daughter of Lawmuir Lassoo and an A12J4 dam. She's one of the top producers in the herd, very placid and a bit of a slow milker. Comes in the first row.
I hoped for a heifer out of her last spring but it turned out that she'd been gestating a schistome (inside out) calf which the vet cut up for her and is now buried behind the calf shed. (You didn't want images did you?)
She's the only cow that has had an observed heat since the bull left the herd a month ago.
Since I'll never see a daughter of hers now, I'm rather glad of one thing - one of the bulls I used as an AB sire last spring is a great-nephew of 62. If Lassoo can sire daughters like that, his genetics are very welcome in my herd.
I'll be waiting rather curiously for the results of PD - which I still have to arrange, at some point when I've decided how I'm going to draft away from the molasses trough at milking time. It seems odd to consider it a 'problem' having what is apparently a very low empty rate, but it's created a situation where I'm still carrying on-farm more cows than I want to take through next winter, and expecting 27 heifers home in May.
Around twenty cows are expected to calve 1 October or later, mostly in the first two weeks of October. This corresponds with the time I started doing AB again, while still running the bull with the larger herd.
One or two other farmers have suggested that it's a good time to sell surplus cows, to realise the high prices. I'm looking ahead to the next, hopefully larger, share-milking job and the advantage of having cows that can rejoin the herd for the cost of trucking, and considering leasing out cows once I know what numbers I've got to juggle.
Unless someone really wants 62 to rear calves for them over winter, she's coming to the end of her dairy career.
(Does that answer a certain 'child's' question about making room in the herd for incoming heifers?)
It's too early to confirm these figures, but this is how the 'balancing act' will probably pan out:
1 June 07 - 160 cows on farm, 44.5 effective hectares.
Four late-calving cows to be sold to South Island.
Two MT heifers culled (to meat works) in June 07.
Sale of four late calvers fell through, decided to keep them
One cow death due to stomach ulcers
One cow death due to milk fever.
One MT heifer culled (to meat works) in September.
Bought one Angus bull.
1 Jan 08 - 155 cows on farm and milking, plus one angus bull.
Feb - culled angus bull, one late calver, one MT eczema cow, two low producers.
March 08 - 151 cows on farm, 131 milking 20 dry.
Aim to carry about 150 through winter.
Expecting to cull 3-5 MT cows following PD (sale of young cows, to works for older ones or poor performers).
Expecting to add 25 heifers (presuming 1 - 2 MT)
Cows in-calf and on farm 31 May 08 - 173
Surplus of 23 to be leased out.
Initially I was expecting a surplus of about ten, but there's not much doubt that there will be some cows available over and above what can be carried on this farm.
The reason for scaling back the numbers - and 150 may still be slightly high - is the age profile of the herd. Close on two thirds of my herd are two and three year olds, animals that are still growing and increasing in capacity to produce. As this group gets older, their feed requirement and production both increase until they reach maturity at around four years old - so the most efficient number of cows per hectare reduces. To add to this scenario, the incoming heifers are largely crossbred, and enter the herd at a roughly equivalent size (and hence feed demand) as the adult Jersey cows.
Last year, expecting the addition to the herd of 40 jersey heifers (plus one Friesian and threee crossbred heifers) and with feed on hand coming out of an under-stocked year, I increased cow numbers by twenty-nine - a huge jump.
I estimated in the early spring that we were probably overstocked by about five cows. Right now, we're over-stocked by about fifty thanks to slowing grass growth and drought conditions. (Last time I walked the paddocks ahead of the cows a 'controlled starvation' ration without supplement - and at that stage there was no molasses and no word of any being available - or increasing the area grazed per day sufficient to feed around a hundred cows was on the ground.)
Rain sky
