March often sees a lull in calving on farms as the number of cows left to calve reduces, so now may be a good time to organise your first milk recording of the year.
Ideally, you should complete two recordings within 60 days of the first cow calving. These early recordings help you to determine the effectiveness of your drying-off routine and check the cure rate during the dry period.
A early recording will also help you to detect infections in cows that may have been picked up during the dry period.
Milk recording
If you have not already completed a recording you should look at completing one in the coming days or weeks.
Recording cows will have a vital role on farms going forward, with the new regulations around antibiotic use on farms now in effect.
Aside from the regulations, milk recording has many benefits to farmers; it helps to determine the best and worst cows in the herd, along with detecting cows that may have subclinical cases of mastitis.
Recording cows and building records around the information gathered can help you to make breeding decisions.
The amount of information available to farmers through milk recording can often be overwhelming at first, but once farmers can understand the information presented to them, the benefits are hard to question.
Uptake
The uptake of milk recording has increased on farms over the last number of years.
The start of 2022 saw a large increase in uptake, based on the latest information from the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF).
For the year so far, there has been an increase of over 18% in the number of cows that have been recorded in 2022, when compared to 2021.
So far in 2022, 178,416 cows have been recorded, compared to 150,442 cows for the same period in 2021.