Working with $30 per hundredweight (cwt) milk isn’t any different than working with $15 per cwt milk. It’s not hard to put milk price in its own special category as something you have no control over, and for the most part, that’s a fair assessment. Even farms who receive a premium that often appears double that of conventional milk have their own challenges with milk prices and building up cash reserves for those inevitable lean times.

Have you seen the little NIR (near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy) device that fits in your pocket for instant dry matter sampling? I started looking into the SCiO device – commercially known as Reveal – as a replacement to drying every feed sample for an hour twice a week.

For some reason, our collective addiction to feed additives and precision feeding has come so far that we tend to ignore some of the basics. We have the ability to add anything we want to any mix and dial in our intakes three places to the right of the decimal point, but what good is all of that if you are mixing the wrong ingredients in the first place?

People are pretty crafty when it comes to scheming up ways to receive a check for doing nothing. For the most part, farm kids are above quitting a job and looking for a handout. But with the pool of qualified available talent shrinking and the number of farms depending on labor outside of the immediate family increasing, it makes sense to put some rules in place for dealing with labor.

Where do you draw the line with those cows that are long days in milk? I’m not talking about long-bred cows; I’m talking about the cows you intend to cull after you milk them out. We all have those cows, but everyone has different criteria for what qualifies as a “do not breed” (DNB) and how long she is considered productive.

It’s not uncommon to be right up against the edge with your forage inventory as new harvest is coming on. No one wants to run out, and ideally, no one wants to feed green forage either. It’s easy to do though. With rising cow numbers or a poor forage year, you can find yourself short on feed. Combine the two and you will certainly have a forage inventory problem that needs attention.

How do you handle move day? It’s not uncommon to have a big move day once a week. Dry cows move to pre-fresh; new dry cows move to far-off dry pens; post-fresh cows move to high groups. It’s a big merry-go-round.

It’s kind of an old hat to constantly dwell on getting the next 5 pounds of milk per cow. It’s easy to talk about, but how do you actually achieve it? Not very many people are brave enough to take you by the hand and show you exactly what it will take to get that next 5 pounds. That’s especially true if you are already making quite a bit of milk per cow.

Retained placentas can be terribly frustrating. Not only can they open the door to a host of secondary disorders, but you just never know if one is a fluke or if you are heading for a transition cow train wreck.