Here’s the catch. IOFC only tells us the economics of what’s going into the tank, not what’s going into the cow for good health and reproduction, and impacting the farm’s true profitability. It measures how well we are converting feed dollars into milk dollars. IOFC values today’s milk but ignores tomorrow’s pregnancies.

During my 20-plus years of analyzing dairy reproductive records, my mantra has always been "Benchmark against yourself, not your neighbor." Of course, there’s value in both, but my belief has always been that you’ll make the greatest gains by keeping your focus on your own results and figuring out how to improve them versus focusing on comparisons.

For the rest of us that don’t have that technology on hand, there are still plenty of ways to monitor early lactation performance to help us better understand the impact of the specific fatty acids we are feeding – specifically, body condition scoring from pre-fresh to fresh, monitoring NEFAs or BHBAs and tracking first butterfat trends in your herd management software to detect any significant changes in fat mobilization.

Let’s walk through the main fatty acids found in dairy diets and talk specifically about the signals they are sending beyond being utilized for energy. While they may seem complex, the stakes are high in understanding their roles as there is a rare function of the cow that is not impacted by fatty acids. 

Let’s play a simple word association game. When I say “milkfat,” what do you say? Palmitic? That’s what I’d expect 80% of you to say if we were having this conversation in person.

If there’s one set of research that has prompted me to think differently about how we manage dry cows, it’s the work done by Dr. Geoffrey Dahl and team at the University of Florida on the effects of heat stress on dry cows.