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south central WI | We breed just enough to holstein semen to maintain our herd, the rest of the calves are born black. A black newborn sells for around $700-900, I'm not sure how they can pay those prices. N
I truly don't know how long a cow lasts now. A few years ago we bred everything to holstein. Our conception rate is excellent, so we had heifers everywhere. Our parlor can only milk so many, so we were selling many semi loads of fresh heifers every year, most went to Canada. We still had too many, so any cow that didn't breed right away was put on the DNB list and shipped when she hit 80-90 lbs of milk. It's hard to get an accurate age range when you have to cull for overcrowding vs health. Our average age is artificially low due to having extra heifers, not due to health reasons.
We still have the same questions, only not as much as when we were selling so many fresh heifers. Do we sell extra heifers and let the current cows milk another lactation, where they produce more but production falls off quicker? Should. We cull a healthy cow and keep the fresh heifers because their genetics should theoretically be better than the cow she is replacing? With high cull prices, I'd rather send them to slaughter than sell them to another dairy, the less cows out there milking the better the milk price will be.
I joined the family dairy in 1998. It's a completely different game now. My milk hauler didn't own a semi in 1998, and that's all he has now. Every farm is direct ship (i believe), so no bulk tanks. Our milk buyer is fairly strict on their customers quality, and it shows. Their weighted avg is over 4.3% fat, 3.3 prot and 100 scc for all farms combined. 25 years ago that would probably be considered unobtainable, but now it's ther average. A majority of those are holstein. Just a wild guess, but most of those herds would be in the 90-100+ lbs a day with those components also. | |
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Short dairy cows
