Having a casual discussion at a dairy meeting with a top dairy producer and a farm manager with years of experience highlighted once again what paying attention to detail means. There are so many moving parts on a dairy with many farms milking nearly 24 hours a day. Having a staff of employees keeps dairy producers busy just seeing the day’s work get done. With so much going on, some details may slip out of sight. Taking time to talk and listen to family and employees may get shoved aside or ignored as the days go by. Here are two examples of small details with huge dollar impacts that were corrected by taking the time to think.

Money down the drain

The first real-life example is a dairy producer who had an employee say, “I do not think one of the waterers in the freestall barn is working.” The dairy producer took time to walk back into the freestalls with the employee to take a look. Sure enough, there was no water coming. However, after further investigation, it appeared the waterer was neither broken or in need of repair. Then, the thought occurred to the farmer, “The waterer is just not getting enough water supply!” That got everyone thinking that adding another well might be in their future.

Not long after, another well was added. After only a few days, the entire herd was up 4 pounds of milk. Without any other diet changes, the surge in milk did not back off.

Four pounds of milk per cow may not look like much for one day; however, in 305 days it equates to 1,220 pounds multiplied by the number of cows in the herd. It was pretty easy to do the math on this one regarding additional annual income and it was almost like getting free milk. It all came down to one thing: paying attention to details.

Clogged income stream

The second example came from a seasoned farm manager who noticed something was a little off. As the herd was slowly building over a few years, the precooler was not top of mind. After all, there were plenty of other decisions to make, and the milk in the tank was at the appropriate temperature.

Then, one day the manager thought, “Maybe we should make an addition to the chiller.”

The addition was made and the next milk check showed that the butterfat percent skyrocketed from 3.6% to 4%. That seemed like an astronomical bump from one month to the next.

The conclusion was the precooler was being overworked and small fat clusters had begun to form. Apparently, this was not helping with the fat test. The interesting thing about the jump was that it did not go away. The manager kicked himself, thinking about how many years of premiums the rather large herd had been losing.

Understandably, some days dairy producers are just too busy to stop and think of the not so obvious. These are just two simple, yet costly, examples of paying attention to details. The good part about both fixes is that the farms added substantial income to their bottom lines.