Golden girls the most lucrative

PLOVER, Wis. — No two farms have the same recipe for profitability and success. However, three Wisconsin dairy farmers — Mitch Breunig, Corey Hodorff and Tony Brey — came together to share their experiences on how the recipe of long-lived cows has positively impacted their farms.

They shared how they have worked to allow promising young cows to age gracefully and become profitable mature cows, at the Professional Dairy Producer’s Herdsperson Workshop Oct. 29 in Plover.

“Every cow is going to leave your farm,” Breunig said. “Does she leave by her choice or yours? If you can get to a level of voluntary culling — where you are picking the cows you want to sell because they aren’t profitable or they’re open, versus selling a cow that gets broken or hurt — that really increases the ability for your farm to be profitable because you’re selling that cow at her maximum value.”

Breunig milks 400 cows on his family’s Mystic Valley Dairy LLC near Sauk City. In recent years, Breunig has made changes to his facilities and management philosophy that have allowed him to see insurgence in mature cows in his herd.

“One of the original studies Nigel Cook did on mattresses and sand was at our farm,” Breunig said. “What really impressed me wasn’t the cows that did lay down. It was the ones that didn’t. That is when we started to learn that some of the cows were too big for the stalls. Those cows got lame and had health troubles.”

Breunig began looking at making changes, removing brisket boards and increasing lunge room, as well as widening the stalls. Those changes moved Breunig from involuntary to voluntary culling in a matter of two years.

“I used to have to move heifers into the mature cow pens to keep the barn full,” Breunig said. “Now I struggle to find places for the heifers because I have two pens full of mature cows when I used to only have one. We remodeled the barn and all the sudden, our cows started to get older, live longer and produce more milk.”

The Hodorff family milks 1,150 cows at Second Look Holsteins LLC near Eden. Longevity is important to Hodorff because the farm transitioned from raising heifers to purchasing replacements after a tornado destroyed their calf barn four years ago.

“Every cow we can keep is one less we have to buy every month,” Hodorff said. “That directly affects our bottom line.”

Like Breunig, Hodorff finds mature cows produce large volumes of milk more efficiently — another factor that makes the multiple-lactation cows attractive.

“We made a management decision that we wanted fewer two-year-olds in the herd,” Hodorff said. “We want to capitalize on that income over feed costs with those older animals. We tend to purchase more second and third lactation cows, when they are in their peak production.”

Recognizing that cow comfort and health play crucial roles in that increased production, the Hodorffs remodeled their freestall barn to increase stall sizes nearly a decade ago.

“I wish we’d done that sooner,” Hodorff said. “Our barn was built in 1992 for those sized cows. As soon as we made the stalls bigger, we saw cows staying around longer and being healthier.”

Brey relies on genomics to help him breed the long-lived cows he wants populating his barns.

With his family, Brey operates Brey Cycle Farm LLC near Sturgeon Bay, where they are in the midst of an expansion from 1,400 cows to 1,600 cows.

“Our number one selection index is productive life,” Brey said. “We feel that gives us our best cow that lives the longest in our herd. We want to extend the lives of our cows, so we can continue to expand and be more selective in which animals we are going to use to make heifer calves and repopulate, versus the ones we’ll make beef calves from.”

Brey looks for positive correlations between productive life indexes  and other indexes when choosing sires.

“Productive life has a positive correlation with production, and with feed saved,” Brey said. “Animals with high productive life are more efficient in eating, are healthier animals and produce more in their lifetimes.”

Though the matriarchs might be more efficient producers, they require more oversight than their younger counterparts. Breunig said his herd operates like two herds within one — 38% of the herd is made up of first lactation heifers, while 42% is in their third lactation or beyond.

“We like having older cows, but the challenge is they have more risk of transition issues and they need the bigger stalls,” Breunig said. “They take more management. If you like having invisible cows with few issues, older cows may not be the way to go, because there is always a chance something can go wrong.”

All three agree technology plays a large role in managing their herds, particularly the older population.

“We have CowManager and it’s changed the way we are handling and treating cows, especially fresh cows,” Hodorff said. “It saves a lot of time and keeps people out of the pens. The cows can be comfortable instead of someone getting them up, trying to find sick cows.”

Their older cows tend to be the functional, strong, balanced cows, the three agree.

“We use the linear traits to avoid the extremes,” Brey said. “We don’t want really straight legs, or teats so short they become a challenge.”

The ideal cow for every farm is probably different, with a few similarities, Brey said.

“Each producer sees what animal works best in their facilities,” Brey said. “I would encourage everyone to identify those animals and go in that direction, from both positive and negative standpoints. We want to identify the cows that live the longest and replicate them. We also want to identify the things that make cows leave and have that make a greater impact on our decisions.”