Introduction
Cattle keepers nationally and internationally are aware of the need to accurately measure and improve herd productive efficiency. Striving for improved efficiency not only makes good business sense, returning a higher margin from each animal, but also reduces the carbon footprint of every kilogram of beef or milk output. Inefficiency and waste in cattle herds occur as a result of reduced fertility, survival or pathologically low growth rates. Measuring these factors at a national level is complicated as we do not have a single database where all of the required information is entered and held. The required information may be available for some herds in private on-farm management software packages but as these programmes vary and are not used by all keepers, they cannot be combined to give a national overview. The national cattle movement database however is universally used by all cattle keepers, and therefore gives a very high coverage, high accuracy dataset of the national herd. We developed a method of transforming the data held in the national movement database into an efficiency measure. The aim of this work was to use the national tracing dataset to describe the efficiency of the Scottish and English cow herds from 2015 until 2020.
Method
Output and resource use
The first step was to identify markers of productive output (recorded calvings and slaughter in an abattoir) and resource use (animal days) in the movement database. This allowed us to visualise efficiency in the database as the number of animal days (the resource used) needed prior to each productive event. Efficiency of growth (animals days to first calving or slaughter of primestock) and fertility (days between consecutive calvings) could be measured in this way. Where death occurred on farm, the age of the animal (capped at a maximum of ~ 2 years old) was taken as the value of the waste.
The perfect cow and perfect herd
Next, we created a simple model of what a perfect cow in a perfect herd might look like. We assumed the perfect cow would never die on farm, so there are no wasted days from death. They would grow to first calving by 2 years old and would then calf once a year, every year until sold. A perfect finishing animal would hit weight for slaughter at 600 days of age (20 months).
Comparing ‘perfect’ with real herds
Next, we compared the model ‘perfect’ herd with the real data from real herds. All cattle in the dataset were compared to perfect, and their performance was expressed as a percentage of the ‘optimal’ animal. For example, if a cow had a calving interval of 400 days instead of 365 days, this was taken as 35 days of ‘waste’ and the animal would score as being 90% efficient compare to the perfect cow. This same method could give efficiency values for slow growth, fertility and animal survival for the entire national herd.
Cost of waste
To estimate the potential savings available nationally by improving efficiency towards ‘perfect’ we gave each animal day a monetary and carbon value. We assumed it would cost, on average, £1.50 per day to own a cow, and that the animal would produce 5.5Kg CO2e, mainly as enteric methane. This allowed us to place both a financial and carbon value on waste due to inefficiency.
Results
The national datasets for Scotland and England were available from 2015 until 2020. There were around 2.5 billion animal days in each calendar year within the data. Of these, approximately 25% were classified as inefficient as they did not meet the ‘optimal’ model. There was a slight trend of increasing efficiency and reduced waste nationally over the six years studied. The improvement from 2015 to 2020 had an estimated value of £101 million (money back on farm through efficiency gains) and a carbon reduction of 369,404 tonnes CO2e.
Of all of the waste days in 2020, 55% were due to slow growth to either first calving (at more than 2 years old) or slaughter (at more than 600 days of age), 21% of waste was due to animals dying on farm, and 20% due to sub-optimal fertility (more than 365 days between calvings).
National Benchmarking
For fun, we did some benchmarking to compare the efficiency of the national herds of Scotland and England. We looked at six different system types (beef breeder, breeder finisher, growers, specialist finishers, seasonal dairy and non-seasonal dairy). To make a competition of it, we awarded 1 point to the country with the most efficient system in 2020. After a tight contest, the results were a square draw, with three points each to Scotland (higher efficiency in beef breeders, breeder finishers and specialist finishers) and England (higher efficiency in growers and both dairy systems).
Take Home Messages
Improving fertility, survival and growth rates are the most cost-effective carbon reduction strategy available to cattle farmers, as doing so both reduces carbon and increases farm income.
We classified approximately 25% of all ‘cow days’ as sub-optimal either due to slow growth, poor fertility or death on farm. Not all of this waste can be eliminated in the ‘real’ world, but we demonstrated that waste has reduced over the time period studied and by measuring waste more accurately we would have a better chance of making more progress in future.
Call for access and support
This new method is powerful as it uses an established, existing dataset (that farmers have already created) to get new insight into technical efficiency.
There is no technological barrier to having this method available in all of the devolved administrations, as the necessary data already exists and we have shown proof of concept that code can be developed that translates this into an efficiency measure.
Getting access to the data is challenging however, due to strict limitations on who can access what information, for what purpose, and when. In our opinion, industry would greatly benefit from access to the information that is generated when using this method.
To keep things light hearted and positive, and to maximise motivation for change, we are calling for a ‘Cow Efficiency Six Nations’ national benchmarking competition to become part of the national conversation, to link our national pride with the efficiency of our cow herds!