Challenging the norm
If we assume a dairy has a tank average of 80 pounds with 4.4% fat and 3.5% protein, that is good production in many situations, but at 6.3 pounds of solids, it still misses the mark. If this herd owner attends an industry meeting and is motivated to go home and find that extra 0.70 pounds of solids, what should the strategy be? In many instances, needed gains in production might center around unrealized ration opportunities to support more milk. Perhaps a simple rise in intake could be the ticket, costing 12 to 15 cents per cow. Maybe the fat test could be raised by adding more to an already “higher than ever before” feed rate of a C16:0 commercial fat product. This fat is not cheap, and the response curve for 16:0 in the diet to milkfat is not linear.
The last piece of the ration puzzle is to potentially supply more robust amino acid package. When cows are milking well already, these additional amino acids add to milk protein at a reduced efficiency when simply added on top of an already well-balanced metabolizable protein diet. The sneaky way to improve milk protein might be to fine-tune the starch supply. Perhaps a bit more starch or upping the starch rate might just create enough extra microbial protein to give you a bump in milk protein. Be careful, however, that you don’t offend fiber digestion or you may lose fat and gain protein.
Is this good or bad? It depends on the value of each component for your milk market and the cost change in the diet to achieve the additional components. And don’t forget the risk of investments that didn’t turn out like the model predicted. Thus, my gentle pushback on the 7-pound goal.
Another way to achieve more milk is to reduce overcrowding in the freestall barn by 5% to 10%. Many dairies push this envelope, and though it always makes me nervous, in a well-managed facility, it can be done surprisingly successfully. But, even in the best managed dairy with an overcrowded pen, if you reduce the cows in that pen by a noticeable 10%, most will agree that milk per cow goes up. So why not just reduce crowding a bit to gain some production per cow? This answer for a well-managed dairy should be that they have done the math and the increased milk per pen makes the overall dairy more profitable. So, is 7 pounds of components per cow in a pen with 250 beds more profitable for the overall farm net income, or is 300 cows in this same barn with less milk flow the winner? To answer that, we need to dial in on feed cost, replacement cost, available forage inventories, permit and/or quota limits, milking frequency strategy, and the way the milk price is calculated for each dairy market.
Finding a happy medium
Yes, attempting to get cows up to 7 pounds of solids, and the various ways to get there is a noble effort. My struggle with the fad is that the headlines and maybe the first paragraph in the conversation seem to lack a solid economic message. In most cases, higher milk component production means higher margin per cow. But not always. Some geographies are still based on flow and fat content. Other unique marketing arrangements may also exist that have differing values of fat, protein, and other solids in milk.
Many in the industry have long since moved past looking at fluid milk flow as their main production metric. In recent years, the shift has been made to look at pounds of butter produced, the price of butter, then pounds of protein produced, and the price of protein. These two main component prices don’t always move together either. Factors like potential international trade uncertainties, changes in consumer preference, and seasonal changes in supply and demand can all impact how the individual price of fat and protein combine to milk income per cow.
Simply adding these together as pounds per cow seems to lose recent gains in understanding how to best drive milk income for a constantly changing market. Remember when cheese consumption drove up milk prices not so many years ago? More recently, butter has been driving the price. Taking a quick look at the milk price change from May to June, fat price per pound rose 1% while protein price per pound skyrocketed by 14%.
Our cows have made leaps in milk production, specifically milkfat production, and our nutrition is getting better all the time. However, the incremental wins in production might be more difficult to achieve, and each extra pound of fat and protein modelled biologically should also be modelled economically. Perhaps income over feed cost is still the best measure on a per cow basis. For more of a whole-farm profitability metric, I would suggest milk income per stall.
Decide what works best
Consider either energy-corrected milk (ECM) or fat-corrected milk (FCM) per pound of intake, whichever best fits the way you get paid for your milk. To make this ratio even more meaningful economically, consider a milk income ratio to feed cost. We call this return on feed cost (ROFC) and it evaluates the success of every feed dollar invested to create milk income. What is added to this ratio that makes it better than ECM or FCM per pound of intake is that it gives consideration to the cost of the feed and the value of the milk. This includes everything from success in feed and milk risk management to the use of feed additives and cow maintenance reduction.
In my view, the most profitable dairy is likely the dairy that has the best ROFC and the number of cows to maximize income per stall on that facility. This may or may not be perfectly aligned with the race to 7 pounds of components.
I don’t mean to sound negative, and we should all celebrate the fact that achieving 7 pounds of combined solids is even possible. My message is that if we forget to separate the value of the two things that create the total, we have lost something true to the economics of milk production. And one last note, if you can move toward or even surpass 7 pounds of solids by improving reproductive success, selective culling, cow comfort, feed hygiene, cow cooling, and hoof health you will have a successful return on investment.
