After several years out in the industry, working with cows and eventually as a sire analyst for Genus for nearly two decades, I had the opportunity to come home and put what I had learnt into practice.
I formulated a breeding plan looking at where we were, where we were heading and where we wanted to go.
We were close to 400 cows with followers. A Holstein stock bull had historically been used but left the farm when I arrived for a combination of health and safety and genetic influence reasons.
The herd was running at 18% Pregnancy rate (Pregnancy rate is simply detection rate x conception rate) vs a national average then of 14%. We were selling just over 8,000kgs per cow per year.
We were getting decent yields but noticed little response to feed changes in the heifer crop. Replacement rate ran at 18% meaning that we were working with a lot of older, more mature cows within the herd. Type wise, they had a fairly consistent cut, great udders, good balanced cows, but they were big framed cows, which wasn’t what my research told me I needed. The sheds were under pressure. We were calving at 25–26 months on average.
Why were cows leaving the herd?
- Barren
- Mastitis
- Lameness
So, not unlike most UK herds. We hadn’t culled one for low production which was a concern, or for type, which was great.
As well as looking at why cows left the herd, what did our ‘survive and thrivers’ have in common? The 75 tonners and above tended to be below average stature within our herd, and usually fairly scarce in the ‘notes’ department in our uniform programme. The ideal cow here has six entries:
- Calved
- Bred
- Routine trim
- PD
- Routine trim
- Dry off
Was there any sire or sires having an impact? I found a huge raft of third and fourth calvers were sired by one bull. Looking at the data, this bull was running over 20% improved chance of daughters making it to fourth calvers than any other sire we had used at the same time. A PLI, health and management trait outlier in his day he had certainly delivered the goods for us. The cows did not have a flashy cut but were medium sized cows that carried a bit more bone through the hock. Udders are excellent and wearing well but his type trait linear shows mostly strongly negative bars. Form follows function.
We have traditional barns with mattresses and sawdust, and bunker fed cows. I have a relatively new parlour, and I want it to remain fit for purpose, so I need my cows to fit in it easily, along with all those cubicles outside. I was getting too many in the upper quartile for size, which were already starting to push the limits for infrastructure.
Our milk contract rewards lots of clean milk on a level dairy, with little incentive to push for high components. They are paying more attention to welfare and treatments such as antibiotic use of cows, so I need to future proof my cow, for if things change with contract demands or alternative buyers, with care for components, reduced carbon footprint and antibiotic use especially.
Efficiency is something that really interests me. If my cows can produce more, or the same, using the same, or reduced inputs respectively, ultimately producing fewer emissions and impacting the environment less, this is absolutely the way for my herd to go in my mind.
So that was the phenotype. How about the genotype, what did I have to work with for the next generation?
We have run a closed herd, so all our genetic progress really needs to come from within.
I ran a Herd Genetic Report powered by AHDB. It’s my report card to how my herd is performing at a genetic level. The first thing that was apparent and quite unique (and not necessarily a good thing) was that my herd was fairly static in terms of genetic progress. That meant it didn’t really matter which age group I concentrated on, as all offered the same level of EPTA to the next generation on average. We were sitting in the top 60%tile for PLI, below average for milk and solids, good for cell counts, but poor for fertility and maintenance notably.
My plan was to breed for the traits I needed, for the strengths and shortcomings I had, pushing progress as hard as I could, and let the cow end up looking like she looked like.
After years of watching and observing the rate of ‘progress’ we have seen in the breed for udder, and type especially has seen more significant progress in this area than any other. We have done more to change how our Holsteins look than how they perform on a health and welfare level and/or production. This is form hoping function follows, and it doesn’t appear to be working as well as it could.
The average size of cows continues to trend upwards. The theme out there still suggests we want powerful cows so they can ‘withstand the rigours of life and can eat more roughage’. I put it to you that we have skewed the population so far, that we have broken most of these relationships, if indeed some ever existed. My cows are becoming smaller, some of that is down to genetics, and the remainder down to calving earlier, and they are giving more milk, have less problems and producing more of that milk from higher levels of forage.
Clayhanger’s Breeding Plan – Margins were really tight back in 2018, and about to get tighter as milk price dropped so I needed to strip costs out of the cow. Profit was my goal, so PLI was the starting point. I needed cows that could produce lots of milk efficiently and have it in them to respond to higher inputs if required, a then limiting point as I’d experienced with our previous crop of milking heifers. I wanted a lot more components within them, so I looked for a heavier weighting on total solids weights.
I wanted to develop a robust cow that could perform despite me, rather than because of me. For me, robustness means vigour and health. I don’t need cows to be big to survive, I just need cows that survive. I keep plenty of emphasis at selection for health traits, specifically fertility, longevity and TBadvantage, and a big crank on lameness advantage.
And the elephant in the room, literally, how big my cows were, and how much bigger they could get unchecked. At the initial time for selection, the trait available was maintenance, one I have a lot of time for. We have broken the link between milk and size and so I was aware that I could really push on the traits I wanted to whilst taking overall size out. As soon as Feed Advantage became available, I put the emphasis on this instead, as ultimately my end goal is to be as efficient as possible.
So, those are the traits I concentrated on. I knew the more traits you put in, the more you dilute the ability to make notable improvements, so I limited it to those. Not a type composite or linear troubled my selection policy.
I switch the bulls I use every proof run, typically picking 7–8 bulls a run, and usually supplementing with later releases of a couple of sires during the run that suit my goals. With using purely genomic bulls, I need to spread my risk to best utilise their potential. I try to keep a variety of bloodlines in there, but I am more driven by absolute breeding value for my herd first. The drive for production is obvious but kept in check with profit and it shows a nice trend on feed advantage.
The rankings here really started to jump in the last year as we started getting well into generation two, and as of December 2021, we are now a top 25%tile milking herd, and our youngstock is safely in the top 5% and trending strongly.
So, how are they performing, and what can we put down to management and genetics? It’s difficult to isolate either, but I know some things have remained fairly constant, i.e. the infrastructure and pretty much the diet for the milkers.
I think we are improving in transition diets and routinely foot trim all cows at 100 days and drying off which has made a massive difference in incidences of lameness. Fertility has moved with Pregnancy Rate going from 18–30%. There are a lot of things that we can put this down to, but truly it’s a combination of me getting better at attention to detail, an RMS team that are on it, improved transition, better legs and feet, and ultimately cows that show much better heats and then hold, and that last bit is definitely genetics.
But what is that actually worth to me? We can assign a financial value to this, taking the herd from 18% to 30% is worth just over £65 per cow per year, or the equivalent to £5.50 per point per year. We can multiply this up to show the herd is more profitable to the tune of over 24k PA based on this improvement in fertility performance alone.
The reason we cull cows has skewed, with Johnes yellow specifically being our number 1 culling reason this year, with fertility and mastitis relegated to second and third. We still haven’t culled a cow for poor udders, and certainly not one that’s too frail or small, and are now in the position that we make voluntary culling decisions.
We calve our heifers at 23 months now, and they give more milk as 2 year olds than we have experienced before, in fact the whole herd is up on milk sold per year, despite being much younger. Pleasingly there is a noticeable improvement in increased milk from forage and we have experienced improved margins, despite until recently a pretty crippling milk price. Our cows from four years ago performances on today’s milk price and cost of production would struggle to be sustainable.
So, my cows are on average a little younger, replacement rate has opened up to 30%, but there are mitigating issues, we sell a lot of milking second calvers, people seem to like the job our cows are doing and keep coming back for them, and we are complimented on the more compact size of our cows.
Crossing back to a point made earlier, how can we tell how much of our improved performance is down to genetics. A recent genetic audit shows strong results, looking at the link between genetics and performance on daughters all on the same system. We can see such a return on investment for production and fertility specifically.
Our girls are on the same management system, same diet, same group and has seen a strong impact on yield we are selling. For every extra litre of milk BV we are putting in, we are seeing 1.2 extra litres in the tank. For every extra kg of fat solids BV we are putting in we are getting over 1.5kgs in the tank. And despite us already running at a high Pregnancy Rate level, we are seeing instead of the expected 0.5 days open per point of daughter fertility, we are actually seeing 0.8 day open improvement per point.
A quick summary of overall herd performance is seeing strong trends for fertility, milk and solids sold per cow per year. With this we are also seeing a big improvement in yield for forage, maximising what we can produce on farm and a strong trend on margins, which ultimately pays our bills, and this is despite a very challenging time for milk prices.
So, to the future. Are we future proofing our herd? A recent report by Promar found that a point of PLI was worth an extra £1.58 in improved margins over the cows’ life.
We can compare where the herd could have been with no emphasis on breeding, and where it is now. The herd is now in the top 25%. The difference between this versus remaining in the top 60% is 104PLI in EPTA, so a Breeding Value (ie how good the cow herself should perform) improvement of 208PLI. Multiply by £1.58 is worth £328 per cow, multiplied by 380 cows should see an improved margin of nearly £125k improved margin for this herd compared to if they had still been a top 60%.
For the youngstock, now safely in the top 5%, again comparing them to a top 60% youngstock is £210epta PLI, or £420 BV. Multiplied by the Promar figure for PLI of £1.58 equals an extra £663 per heifer on average in improved margins over its productive life. That figures out to be over 1/4 million.
Selecting for profit is paying dividends in the stock we have today and their performance here as well as setting us up to have a strong future. This for me is the ultimate definition of function. And for what it’s worth, I think they are an impressive group of cattle to the eye as well as on the balance sheet.