Market signals will always drive change and continued low returns will drive numbers down. A million dairy cows being culled is a good example of this but for the dairy industry there is at least an attempt to paint a picture of the way forward. Wouldn’t that be a novel approach for the red meat industry?
Making changes, such as lambing or calving dates, needs to be done carefully. To do so purely on market signals is understandable but productivity is still linked to profit. So much of productivity is related to feed supply and the management of it and key dates are also influenced by feed supply.
There is always a sweet balance between top production and top profit.
Lambing earlier, for example, to capture a better lamb market might result in a drop in flock performance. An earlier mating could easily lower the scanning. Add to that, lambing earlier when feed supply is potentially less reliable means the effect can be exaggerated by a slow spring.
It’s easy to model how much extra has to be earned from lambs sold early to compensate for a smaller lamb crop – it’s just like lowering the stocking rate to give more freedom with feed allocation. Production per head has to be increased in this case to compensate for fewer productive animals. However, there are so many variables that affect the outcome in any one year that it usually takes a few, if not several years before the benefit or otherwise of any changes is really obvious.
A date that seems to be readily changed is the calving date. However, to do this is even more risky than with ewes if the date is brought forward. Because the time between calving and mating is so critical in influencing the conception rate, to shorten this period puts a lot of pressure on pregnancy outcomes. The effect is illustrated by later-calving cows.
My vet service collected figures a long time ago on the pregnancy rates of third-cycle calving beef cows. Overall, their in-calf rate was just under 10 percentage points behind those calving in the first two cycles. An interesting feature of these results was that on some farms that had early-calving herds, the third-cycle cows performed as well as the rest. My take was that the earlier-calving cows were underfed because of calving too early while the third-cycle cows matched the feed supply.
What happens in many herds though is the mean calving date gradually becomes later as a result of cows just not being fed well enough in spring.
The cost is just a small lift in the number of empty cows but not enough to ring alarm bells but then a much tighter spring comes along and suddenly there is a big jump in the number of empty cows.
Often it is a big enough discrepancy to look at bulls or bovine viral diarrhoea, for example.
When more than 15% of the herd is in that third cycle the pregnancy rate is exposed to how good the late spring is. It’s not surprising that beef cow calving has trended later and later to better fit feed supply. With later calvings there is less metabolic disease and generally tighter calving spreads, both because of a more secure feed supply.
Change is the essence of progress. There are several types of change and the ones that are most often seen are tweaks, big or small, of existing policies. Is changing the lambing or calving date merely a tweak? In some farm business plans those dates are defined, in which case a few days here or there may be a tweak but 10 days or more is a significant change.
Evaluating change is an important exercise but not one New Zealand farmers traditionally invest much time, energy or money in. As a generalisation we are very much “suck and see” types, which, given the progress that we have made, is hard to argue with.
A change that is happening now, however, is the gradual growth of corporate farming boards and these boards do not like the “traditional” Kiwi approach to change.
Trevor Cook is a Manawatu veterinarian.
