You’re busy – milking cows, managing employees and making 2019 cropping preparations. With that in mind, Progressive Dairyman looks at issues in the news impacting you and your dairy business.

For decades, our accounting firm has produced quarterly dairy farm cost studies for our clients and others to use for benchmarking and profitability improvement. The following is our preliminary report called the 2018 National Dairy Advanced Index.

Art and Renee Schaap are living a nightmare. Last summer, their farm’s water wells were found to be contaminated with chemicals from the adjacent Canon Air Force Base. And things have quickly gone from bad to worse for the fourth-generation dairyman and his family.

Michaline (Micki) Tomich’s experience design firm, Mixdesign, assisted Fair Oaks Farms with the recent redesign of their agritourism and educational experiences. The new exhibits opened this spring.

Raising heifers today is about having the right ones, not keeping every one. Do you need an inventory of heifers to maintain your milking herd? Of course. But are you confident your heifer inventory contains the type of females you need to sustain your herd and help you reach your herd’s productivity and profitability goals?

Meet cow 8968. She lives on a 1,500-cow dairy farm in Wisconsin, where she’s milked three times per day through a double-20 parallel parlor. She’s fed a well-balanced ration and spends her time resting in sand-bedded freestalls.

Advanced reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) offer significant opportunities for genetic advancement in your dairy operation, but if you’re like most commercial producers, you have one burning question: “What is the economic return?”

With current low milk prices and negative profit margins, dairy farmers and bankers are asking nutritionists to reduce feed costs. On some farms, all feed additives have been removed, which may save 30 to 40 cents a day, but leads to reduced fertility, lower milk yield and components, and poorer health status.

As nutritionists and dairymen, our goal when feeding dairy cattle is to provide each group of cows with the nutrients needed to support their milk production, maintenance, growth, health and reproduction.

Fatty acids are one of the last major nutrient categories to be truly “balanced” in our dairy cow diets. Several factors have come together recently to make now the era of fatty acid balancing. First, producers are getting paid more per pound of milkfat as a percentage of their milk check.