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Many dairy producers think through their business decisions using some kind of “what if” scenario. For example, “what if I change the ration, and then hot weather hits?” It’s a type of thinking that helps to remove the emotional bias. This method weighs the pros and cons of a decision by projecting a real dollars-and-cents outcome.
Partial budgets are a handy tool that can help you make specific decisions about your dairy. They can be performed on a multitude of decisions, including feed program changes, reproduction programs, cropping operation’s enterprise effects on the dairy and so on. The economic power these that spreadsheets (or handwritten budgets) have on a dairy can be a very useful, and sometimes eye-opening, event.
Dear Progressive Dairyman,
I’m a consumer, and I support the Specter-Casey bill.
Signed,
John Doe, Consumer
Over the past several months, Progressive Dairyman has literally received hundreds of letters that are almost identical to the one above, mostly from Pennsylvania. They usually come in groups, but with individual names and addresses of people that are responding to the magazine’s dairy reform plan poll.
As dairy producers search for solutions to ongoing reproductive challenges, nutrition remains one of the leading avenues to improve breeding pen success. New research presented at the 2010 ADSA meetings by Drs. Jose Santos, Bill Thatcher and Charlie Staples, reported new results further linking nutrition to production performance, reproductive success and health through essential fatty acid (EFA) supplementation.
As high summer temperatures give way to cooler fall weather, the seasonal transition offers relief from heat stress. But even with more comfortable daytime highs, the herd may feel the aftereffects of heat stress for several more months. Now’s the time to assess how hot weather may have damaged your herd’s reproductive performance.
Take a look backRecords analysis is a good starting point for herd assessment. Producers should check three key measurements for signs of a drop in performance.
Dairy producers many times find themselves in a balancing act when striving to maximize their reproductive and nutrition programs. Nutritional deficiencies and ration imbalances can lead to poor reproduction performance, but there are also many other factors to consider before altering your current nutrition program. Poor reproduction performance can also be the result of poor heat detection, time of insemination, insemination practices, diseases, toxins and other management-related problems.
ABS boosts global sire lineup
With the release of the August 2010 sire summary data, ABS added sixteen new Holstein sires to its active global lineup.
Among the group of new sires added to the lineup, ABS added five elite TPI sires with Doberman, Winston and Adrian debuting in the Top 100 TPI. High-ranking TPI ABS graduates include the following.
29HO13359 Beer-Crest Bremer Adrian – Backed by nine generations of cows over 100,000 pounds milk lifetime, hails from the same cow family as 29HO13325 Magnetism and combines high NM$ (+538), longevity (+5.4 PL) and balanced type
Fluctuations in the prime rate are of great concern to agricultural operations. The prime rate has traditionally been the interest rate that banks charge their best customers, and it strongly influences the setting of other interest rates. The prime rate varies little among banks, and banks generally adjust their rates at the same time.
As a result, agricultural managers are among the many now asking: “Where are interest rates headed?”
Only 115 shopping days until Christmas! I’ll bet you can hardly wait! Likely, you have been losing sleep over what gifts you will buy for those special people in your life. Perhaps you are spending endless hours combing through catalogs and surfing the Internet for ideas.
Maybe you have even begun scripting your first rough draft of your own list. Sound ridiculous? Quite! … at least to me. However, it is this same kind of spirit that should be applied when talking about milk marketing.
TRENDING TOPIC ARTICLE: A.I. & BREEDING
Published: September 1, 2010 print issue of Progressive Dairyman
In this past article, Nate Zwald and Gerbrand van Burgsteden of Alta Genetics highlighted the benefits of genomics and the data to back it up. Scroll down or to jump to the article.
We all know and sorely miss the “good old” days in which a dairyman was able to call his banker and ask for more money to purchase cows, feed and rolling stock, etc. and then to plan on the money being in the account by the time he hung up the phone.
Now the approach of doing business as a dairy is evolving and involving more financial players actively at the table. Eighteen months of low milk prices has drained generations of equity from a dairy’s balance sheet and called for critical changes in business practices.
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