What is Dairy Herd Management?

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Milk recording is at the heart of the Dairy Herd Management (DHM) service offering.

It is a beneficial tool on farm which monitors the individual performance of each cow within your herd. Milk recording doesn’t just give you a platform to view individual yields, milk solids and SCC. It is also a great tool to highlight on farm issues with fertility, herd health and nutrition therefore allowing for improved on farm management decisions.

Dairy Herd Management offer a range of types and timings of recordings to suit everyone, from having a milk recorder come on farm to complete the recording or to completing the recording yourself (DIY).

Recording options

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Ian Nelson and Jonathan Carson. (Pic: Freelance)Ian Nelson and Jonathan Carson. (Pic: Freelance)
Ian Nelson and Jonathan Carson. (Pic: Freelance)

All recording options can be carried out on a four, six or eight weekly basis. The various options are highlighted below:

- Assisted or DIY

Assisted recording is the most common and involves a trained milk recorder coming to the farm to take samples.

DIY recording involves you collecting the samples yourself for the recording. A milk recorder still gets allocated to process the samples and any cow information you supply.

- Non-Factored or Factored

Non-factored recording involves an AM and PM recording being completed.

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The factored recording option means that only one milking needs to be sampled. This should be alternated with each recording between AM and PM milkings to ensure greater accuracy.

- Health test only

This is a great option for those who aren’t ready to start full milk recording and provides individual Butterfats, Proteins and SCC for each cow. It removes the need for yields and events such as dry offs and calving details to be included but won’t provide total lactation yields, SCC averages etc.

- Holstein complete

This is ideal for pedigree dairy farmers and offers the complete package including milk recording, pedigree calf registrations and classification costs, charged at a simple monthly rate. This option removes registration and classification costs from the Breed Society and usually offers a significant cost saving.

What information do I need to provide to start milk recording?

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At a basic level, they need cow identification details, including eartag and line number, calving dates and lactation number. To get the most information out of your recording we recommend you provide, service, PD, and dry off dates. There is also the option to include mastitis, lameness and body condition scores etc. Any of this information can be provided manually but DHM can link to several external software systems which saves on time and duplication.

There is also the option to add your own cow information onto the system via ‘Yourherd’ or the Mobile Herd app.

Your herd

Your herd is a web-based system where you can view your whole herd performance or on an individual cow basis. It can act as standalone herd management programme, or it can be used alongside your on-farm parlour software. Free use of the medicine book is available for all recording types except health test only herds.

Mobile herd

Mobile herd is our mobile app, which allows you to add data to the system whilst on the farm. It’s a quick and simple way to add services or pregchecks and is a handy way to check individual cow details whilst out and about.

Heath Testing

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Additional health tests are also on offer. These use the milk sample taken from the milk recording. We offer a range of health testing options, such as Johnes, IBR, BVD, Lepto and Neospora. While milk urea can be tested at cow level as well as Pregcheck – our pregnancy diagnosis service.

Once you receive your milk recording results any selected samples will be sent for the required health tests. This can be selected to be completed quarterly or on an ad hoc basis.

Sensehub

As part of the Dairy Herd Management portfolio, we provide the Sensehub Animal monitoring technology. This is a tag or collar-based system which, monitors animal health and heat activity. This will streamline your breeding workload, removing the need for laboursome heat detection, and can identify silent heats as well as early detection of health issues such as mastitis, displaced abomasum’s, lameness etc, while also highlighting anoestrous cows and monitoring rumination. Once a heat event has been detected it then provides you with the best AI timings (for both conventional and sexed semen), based on research to maximise conception rates. It also provides a facility to record PD and service events, which will provide dry off timings.

If you wish to find out more about Dairy Herd Management, or sign up to start recording, you can contact Ian Nelson on 07900248073 or Jayne Boland on 07709457697.

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