Saturday, March 30, 2024

Once-a-day revisited

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There can be no doubt the New Zealand dairy industry is in crisis mode, with the immediate future for many farmers looking extremely bleak.
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Concurrent with the crisis, the paramount feature of which is there will be no significant recovery of prices in the immediate future, we have had, in the media, a fair degree of comment on the best way forward. The common theme is to maintain a viable and profitable industry, it is essential the cost of production be lowered to equate with a much lower milk price. In other words we should go back to our traditional strengths of producing milk primarily from cheaply produced quality pasture, and managing this extremely efficiently, primarily with the grazing animal.

Our recently completed trial at the Stratford Demonstration Farm compared an intensive production system, with high inputs of bought-in feed, with the more traditional, virtually completely pasture-based, low-cost system.

The results of this trial have shown quite conclusively that the less-intensive, low-cost system is, not surprisingly, much more profitable at low milk prices. Thus if we are faced with a long term of significantly lower prices, the re-adoption of a less-intensive, predominantly pasture-based system is the way forward.

It is also reasonable to assume de-intensification would have notable environmental effects, and go some considerable way in counteracting the “dirty dairying” lobby.

Regular readers of this column will know I have been beating the drum for low-cost production systems for some time now and it gives me some small degree of satisfaction that this philosophy is becoming more and more mainstream.

However, it is overly simplistic to suggest the easy solution to the crisis is to revert to low-cost dairying. Many farmers have invested heavily in high-cost intensive systems and as a result are virtually locked in to this. For them there is no easy way back.

Farmers as a whole need to be looking at other means of reducing costs, and in so doing I wonder if in fact they are ignoring the elephant in the room that is emblazoned with the words once-a-day milking (OAD).

In introducing this topic, I go back to my younger days when my upbringing and interests lay much more with sheep farming than with dairying. I came back from a year on exchange in the United Kingdom and regaled my sheep-farming clients with tales of UK farmers sitting up all night to assist at the difficult lambing of just one ewe. They of course fell about laughing at this – and then went out and did a twice-daily, or even thrice-daily, lambing beat. The lambing beat was seen as an absolutely necessary part of sheep farming. I can recall the manager of a fairly large sheep farm being virtually run out of the district because he had been seen on the golf course at the height of lambing.

However, like today’s dairy industry, the sheep farmers of the time were faced with a long spell of depressed prices, necessitating increasing stocking rates, in order to stay viable – meaning increased stock units per labour unit. In this scenario something had to give and so the concept of easy-care sheep, in particular easy-care lambing, surfaced.

To establish an easy-care flock there were two possible avenues of approach. One was the ruthless Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest approach – leave them to their own devices and let Mother Nature sort out the survivors. The other, more benign, approach was to identify and ruthlessly cull all ewes having any difficulty at all lambing, and use only rams selected for easy-care characteristics.

In practice most farmers wanting to change adopted a policy somewhere in the middle of these two options.

Now let’s look at some parallels with dairy farming and OAD milking.

Three-times-a-day milking is not uncommon in much of the world but the NZ dairy farmer looks on this with derision – as did his sheep farming compatriot on the idea of staying up all night to lamb a ewe. However he still tends to look at twice daily milking as sacrosanct – as did, in the past, the sheep farmer with the lambing beat. Yet a similar option exists. A dairy farmer could change to OAD brutally by just doing it and culling all cows that couldn’t handle it – those (partially) drying off or developing udder problems etc. Or the more gentle approach, going OAD late in the season and identifying non-adaptable cows then, and using sires selected for OAD characteristics. This latter idea is a quite realistic pathway.

A bit of thought shows breeding a cow adapted for OAD should be perfectly feasible. If we accept the gold standard of a peak daily production per cow of 2kg milksolids (MS) then:

A top Friesian-Holstein cow can produce 40 litres of milk a day, giving her an udder capacity of 20 litres when milked twice-daily. A Jersey cow can produce milk with a test of 10% MS, rising to possibly 13% at the end of the season. Combine the two – the udder capacity of one and the test of the other, at 10% of 20 litres = 2kg and the answer is 2kg MS/day. Case closed.

Breeding objectives have been moving steadily in this direction for some time but no doubt the impetus could be increased.

Now let’s look at the advantages of OAD – and I don’t pretend this list is at all exhaustive.

  • The obvious one is labour saving and efficiency, and associated with this the more intangible benefits of possibly more leisure time – stay at the beach rather than go home to milk.
  • Reduced cost for maintaining and operating dairy and machinery.
  • Less walking for cows. Gives better feed efficiency – more energy and grazing time for milk production. Less hoof damage and fewer lame cows.
  • More excreta returned to the paddock rather than lost in races and yards – soil fertility payoff. Also less pressure on effluent disposal systems and a saving in water at the dairy for cooling, washing and hosing down.
  • Possible easier and more-efficient pasture management from 24-hour grazing.

I think these advantages are overwhelming and it could well be that 20 years down the track, twice-a-day milking on dairy farms could be as rare as a twice-a-day lambing beat on sheep farms is today.

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