Feed costs are the greatest expense on a dairy. With feed prices moving higher, margins will become even tighter, making it difficult to build equity. A choice looms: Cut back/remove feed ingredients from the ration or forge ahead and maintain current ingredient levels. Either way, revisiting feed management pays off. If feed has been forward contracted for a lesser price or is already stored in the bunker, it still must be closely managed.

With cotton production down and the need for supplemental feeds high, cottonseed prices are nearly double that of an average year, according to Texas AgriLife Extension Service personnel. Despite rains, the entire state remained in one stage of drought or another, with more than 70 percent under severe to exceptional drought conditions, according the U.S. Drought Monitor.

By weight, water is the most important nutrient in a milking cow’s ration, easily making up greater than 80 percent of total intake by weight. We hope you have been motivated to have your farm’s drinking water tested for the things that most often lead to water quality issues:

Dairy producers spend a great deal of time, effort and money ensuring dairy cow rations are fine-tuned to the “nth” degree. A few milligrams of this, a few parts per million of that, all to ensure no stone goes unturned in the quest for the perfect ration. Unfortunately, in the process the most important nutrient of all often goes barely noticed and only lightly considered. What nutrient? Water.

The dairy industry is flocking to Texas, especially the Panhandle. Currently, in the Texas High Plains there are 234,000 milk-producing cows. In Texas the number of dairy cattle have greatly increased in the northern High Plains from 6,000 head in 2000 to over 185,000 head in 2010.

Replacement heifer feeding programs must be designed to allow heifers to be bred efficiently, calve out by 24 months old and produce to their maximum potential. To achieve this,heifers must be fed to grow at a high rate while not becoming overconditioned, as well as to remain healthy.

It’s that time of year once again. The leaves have fallen, harvest is near completion and without any break in the action, decisions for 2012 are already upon producers. For dairy producers, the decision of which hybrid or hybrids to plant in 2012 can have significant financial implications.

Sound reproductive programs are one of the keys to dairy profitability. Perhaps no other area of dairy management has as many influencing factors as reproduction. A herd’s incidence and severity of metabolic and infectious disease, lameness and heat stress, the level of milk production, heat detection accuracy and efficiency, conception rate and a variety of other cow, management and nutritional considerations, all can and do influence reproductive success to varying degrees.

Keeping an eye on milk fat production is important because milk fat is a valuable part of milk and is very responsive to herd management.Milk fat concentration is very variable from farm to farm and even between cows on the same farm. Every producer has a different goal for milk fat and has a different definition of “low milk fat.”