Milk recording has a vital role to play on dairy farms, and is becoming even more important with selective dry cow therapy (SDCT) becoming common practice on farms.
It has a number of crucial roles to play, but probably the most important is going to be around the monitoring and tracking of cell counts.
For the tracking/monitoring of cell counts to be effective there really needs to be a minimum of four recordings completed every lactation.
Production
Milk recording data can be used to track production from cows and make it easy to determine the best performing cows within a herd.
One of the milk recording reports ranks the herd based on their performance which makes it easy to select cows that will be suitable for general replacements and others that may need to be culled from the herd.
The economic breeding index (EBI) outlines the potential genetic merit of an animal, and by using milk recording, you can see if this is being achieved.
If the potential genetic performance is not being met, there may be an issue that needs to be looked at or it was possible that a genomic bull did not perform as expected.
It is important to know what this issue could be, as it will have an influence on breeding decisions moving forward.
Cell counts
Another key area that can be monitored and improved from milk recording is cell counts within herds.
Ongoing cell count data is vitally important for dairy farmers to ensure that cell counts are improved and problem cows are dealt with.
With farmers now having to use SDCT it is going to be vital for dairy farmers to have data available to show which cows need antibiotics and which don’t.
It is also useful for monitoring the herd over a lactation and identifying cows that likely just need to be culled from the herd.
Milk recording
Completing a milk recording is one thing – using the information it gives is another.
The data can, and should be used to make breeding decisions. Going forward, only the best cows should be used for generating replacement heifers.
These top-performing cows can be identified through milk recording along with their genetic merit from their EBI.
Cell count information is also important, as it allows farmers to breed from cows that have consistently had low cell counts.
Many farmers have some concerns around some of the production data with fat and protein percentages an issue for some.
But the benefits of having the data outweigh the concerns of many and it should result in improved performance and profits from herds.