Old girls earning their keep

UTICA, Minn. — There is a group of old cows at Shadycrest Holsteins that has more than earned their keep.

There are several cows from Scott and Michelle Herber’s dairy on the 2025 Minnesota Dairy Herd Improvement Association lifetime production list. In fact, the Herbers had 12 of the top 200 cows on the list, including six in the top 20.

“I’m just so proud of the production and a good, healthy bunch of cattle,” Scott Herber said.

Cows making the DHIA lifetime production list must demonstrate extreme longevity, high production, or both over multiple lactations, and they are ranked by dollar value.

The top cow on the 2025 list was Herber’s #5249, who was 11 years old and in her 10th lactation. Lifetime, she had 342,548 pounds of milk, 15,695 pounds of butterfat and 11,139 pounds of protein, equaling a $66,330 value. She was the only cow on the list that produced over 15,000 pounds of lifetime butterfat, with an average test of 4.6% across all lactations.

Herber said #5249 is no longer in the herd, but the next five of his cows on that list are all still around, and four of them are bred back.

“I am really proud to have cows milking 300,000 plus pounds (of milk), and soon I hope to get a couple of them that are milking 400,000 plus pounds,” Herber said. “Anything is possible for some of these cows to excel.”

If any of Herber’s cows reach 400,000 pounds of milk, he hopes to take a picture of that cow in front of a line of eight semis. Each truck and trailer would represent roughly 50,000 pounds, totaling the cow’s 400,000-pound lifetime achievement.

Herber milks 700 cows at his dairy near Utica. He said in the last 20 years, he has had the top lifetime production cow in Winona County about 50% of the time.

Herber does not attribute the longevity and production success of this herd to any one thing. His herd averages about 111 pounds of milk per day and has a 36,612-pound herd average.

“There’s a lot of little things and a lot of luck that goes along with it,” Herber said.

His cows are milked three times a day in a double-12 parallel parlor and housed in sand-bedded freestall barns. Cows are split into groups based on number of lactations. Any cow in her fourth lactation or more is separated into an older cow group.

“We don’t overcrowd it, and they seem to excel there,” Herber said.

Herber said he has used a variety of sires in his breeding program, and all of his current top longevity cows are out of the same stud company, but from different maternal families.

All cows see the hoof trimmer twice a year and spend their dry period at a different farm down the road with a loafing pasture.

Twenty-one days before they freshen, Herber tries to get the cows back solely on a total mixed ration diet.

“We try to get the pre-fresh cows to eat 30 pounds of TMR,” Herber said. “It’s important that their intakes are at 30 pounds of TMR.”

This strategy has helped their cows avoid ailments like milk fever, displaced abomasums and retained placentas early in their lactation.

“Then we have hardly any trouble with the fresh part of their life,” Herber said. “The older cows seem to flow through that period of life now.”

For Herber, as long as cows breed back and do not have mastitis issues, they stay in the herd.

“There’s not a lot of hope for growth or potential for multiple reasons, so we have to get the most amount of milk out of our cows in this facility,” Herber said. “At the same time we keep those cows around because they are milking well … they have to hold their own. (The old cows) might get a little favoritism but not a lot.”

Herber said he has multiple 10th-lactation animals currently in his barn, but he remembers having cows 14 or 15 years old at one point.

“We have a pretty good culling program here that they have to do pretty well to stay,” Herber said. “They have to earn their way, but they are usually doing that on their own.”

Herber has two full-time herdspeople who have been with the farm for the past 18 years, as well as his son, Ross.

“It takes really good people that really care about cows,” Herber said.

Herber started buying into dairy cattle in 1979 and started farming on his own in 1993. He said his early years had many challenges that make him appreciate how far he has come today.

“You appreciate it more when you come from humble beginnings,” Herber said. “It’s taken 33 years to get to this point.”

Herber said he looks forward to continuing to raise high-producing cows that last.

“If I have a bad day, I’ll walk through (the old cow pen), and that makes me feel pretty good,” Herber said. “I am pretty proud of it. They are therapy for me to be able to have such productive cows.”