From an animal health perspective, what are some of the decisions you might need to make?
It’s important to know what feed you’ve got and what the cows’ demands will be in the near future. Body condition scoring at least 70 cows in each mob on a monthly basis will give you early warning if animals are going backwards. Realistic feed budgets through autumn, winter and into spring will help with decisions about whether animal numbers need to be reduced, supplementary feed offered or other strategies employed. With cash flows tight, supplementary feeding options are less attractive than in better payout years. The risk is that if cows strip body condition in late lactation, the cost of buying additional feed in to make up the deficit may be prohibitive. As a crude rule of thumb, you shouldn’t be paying more than 5% of the payout, so at $4.70 that is about $240 a tonne.
Getting body condition score back on requires additional feed. Depending on body condition score deficit, target live weight and feed quality, you might need 150 to 200kg of drymatter to get a condition score back on. This is on top of the requirements for maintenance and pregnancy. With a 100-day dry period needed, this works out at about an extra 2kg daily drymatter on top of the maintenance requirements which might be eight to 10kg drymatter a cow a day.
Pregnancy test results should be available, and if empties or late calvers haven’t been culled, now would be a good time to consider doing that if feed is tight. It is also timely to review mating performance, so print out the Fertility Focus Report and talk with your adviser about options for next season.
Once-a-day milking will reduce the nutrition requirements somewhat, because cows produce about 15% less on once-a-day than on twice-a-day, but clearly they still need more feed than dry cows.
Don’t forget about any young stock off-farm. Getting heifers to target is an ongoing issue for the industry and a tough autumn will only make that job harder. Look at feed availability and options to plug feed gaps if apparent.
Bulk somatic cell counts have been declining nationally for a number of years now, which is hopefully giving people more flexibility in terms of going onto once-a-day, milking on longer – if feed is available – and fewer clinical mastitis infections to deal with in spring. Given the progress on many farms, the temptation might be to take the foot off the pedal in terms of managing milk quality. Since empty rates appear to be up in some areas there might be reduced culling pressure on high cell-count or repeat clinical mastitis cows.
Also, short-term cash flow issues might put pressure on dry cow therapy decisions. The evidence is clear that dry cow therapy works and particularly for high cell-count cows combination therapy – an antibiotic and an internal teat sealant – works even better.
For lower cell-count cows, teat sealant alone is a viable option as the risk of mastitis in the next season and the cell counts of cows treated with teat sealant alone has been shown to be equivalent to that of antibiotics. It’s certainly better than leaving cows completely untreated at the end of lactation.
The proviso with use of teat sealants is that hygiene is critical. Teat sealants are not antibiotics and if bacteria carried into the gland infections may establish. Talk with your vet about these options and consider using technicians, employed by many veterinary practices, who are experienced at using teat sealants.
