How many times a day do you milk, and what is your current herd average, butterfat and protein? We milk three times a day. Our herd is averaging 106 pounds of milk per day with tests of 4.33% butterfat and 3.25% protein.
Describe your housing and milking facility. We milk in a double-16 parallel parlor. We have six-row freestall barns and utilize sand bedding.
Who is part of your farm team, and what are their roles? Our ownership group consists of John and Luann Shea, my wife, Katie, and me. Katie is more of our herd manager. She works really well with people and is fluent in mastitis treatments as well as the transition cows. Juvenal heads the calf department and has a really good eye for calves and making sure they are drinking to the level they should be and how to handle the calves when they are not. Jesus is one of our top guys. He handles all our sand operations. He helps organize the hoof trimmer and the dry-offs and does a really good job in our herdsman role. He milks a couple of shifts a week and is a crucial part of our team. Jill Wiederholt manages our calves and does a lot of our financial paperwork. She is our primary bookkeeper, handling the finances.
What is your herd health program? We have herd check every Monday. There we do our traditional pregnancy checks and our ovsynch protocol. We use Bovi-Shield and a J5 vaccination at 35 days of milk during herd check. We will dry off and do ScourGuard and a J5 vaccination at that time. We are selective on our dry cow treatment, individualizing it based on each cow. From there, we will also utilize a teat sealant. At 25-28 days out, we will move them to pre-fresh and administer another round of ScourGuard and J5. Fresh cows all get Inforce nasal vaccine and cows third lactation and older get a calcium bolus at calving. We monitor for the first 10 days in milk.
What does your dry cow and transition program consist of? Our dry cow period averages 60 days, and that fluctuates depending on the individual cow. We’ll vaccinate with ScourGuard 4KC and J5. We’re pretty selective on the dry cow treatment, monitoring their cell count. If it is below our threshold, we will not give Spectramast DC, only a teat sealant. If they are over 100 pounds or have a mastitis event, they will get the Spectramast dry cow treatment. For the dry cow area, we built a new barn in 2022, a six-row, sand-bedded freestall barn. Our ration depends on how close they are to calving. We mix a different ration for the far-off group and another for the pre-fresh group. The pre-fresh group is 28 days before they’re scheduled to calve. When we get to their calving date, we’ll bring them into a straw bedded calving pen. That pen is more visible from all areas of the farm, which is super critical for us because we always want to have someone checking on that group to make sure they are all comfortable. They will return to the herd varying on their lactations. The more mature cows will return between 14-21 days post-fresh. Heifers and younger ones might be 35 days post-fresh before they join the herd.
What is the composition of your ration, and how has that changed in recent years? Our main milking diet is a premix consisting of high-moisture corn, dry corn, dry gluten feed, soybean meal and whey/delactosed permeate. We’ll also use a mineral package to go with our traditional haylage and corn silage. Currently, we run about a 60% forage diet.
Tell us about the forages you plant and detail your harvest strategies. We grow alfalfa and corn. We harvest the alfalfa at two feet high. After we cut it, we try to have it harvested within 30 hours. We average 28 days between crops. For corn silage, we pay attention to dry matter. Sixty-five percent moisture looks different every year, so we monitor kernel and stalk moisture because that varies by year.
What is your average somatic cell count and how does that affect your production? Our SCC is sitting at 52,000. Our sand crew does a fantastic job of keeping the stalls full and properly groomed. The scrapers on every milking shift also clean out the stalls as they push cows to the parlor. Attention to detail in the prep routine is another area of focus for keeping the SCC low. Lastly, a healthy cow on a well-balanced diet will better fight off infections, therefore producing more milk.
What change has created the biggest improvement in your herd average? The largest improvement came when we were able to match our feed quality with the overall ration. Small changes amounted to big milk. Having the right people in the right places really makes a big difference as well. Over the last four or five years, we have focused on timely harvesting, making the most of every acre, and, most importantly, cow comfort.
What technology do you use to monitor your herd? Currently, we rely on our great employees. In the future, we plan to use CowManager. But at this point, we rely on our people monitoring and paying close attention to the herd.
What is your breeding program, and what role does genetics play in your production level? We run a presync/ovsych program. That plays a massive role for us. We have improved our genetic potential over the last 15 years by changing our strategy. We have focused more on breeding for components and daughter pregnancy rate, and that’s been super critical for us and our herd. It has enabled us to bump our voluntary waiting period back to 80 days in milk from the original 60 or 65 and has helped us gain milk.
List three management strategies that have helped you attain your production and component level. Our top management strategies are hiring and retaining quality employees, paying attention to detail and having a great support team. Most of our employees have been here for the past 10-15 years and they care about our dairy. They want to see us do well, and that investment in us and our herd really helps us. Our attention to detail has been crucial, too. There are a lot of other producers out there, but how closely we monitor our herd and pay attention to details helps us find things early and get them fixed. The support team of our hoof trimmer, nutritionist, breeder, vet and everyone else works well together. We know they want us to succeed as much as we want to. Having that kind of synergy from the top down has been such an important piece. We are lucky to work with the people we do.
Tell us about your farm and your plans for the dairy in the next year. We want to keep operating at a high level and keep costs low. We want to look to the next generation to see where we can make that transition smoothly years from now when it becomes more of a reality.
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