The transition from the dry period to lactation is the most stressful part of a dairy cow’s life. Physiological and hormonal changes accelerate during the eighth month of gestation as the milk secretion glands enlarge in the udder and the cow prepares to give birth.

There was a time when dairy farming in the U.S. consisted primarily of the neighborhood dairy farm milking a handful of cows, requiring a few acres for hay and pasture, producing just a few gallons of milk per cow per day. If you would have told a dairy farmer at the turn of the 20th century that in 100 years a cow would be producing over 15 gallons of milk after she freshened, he would have looked at you like you were daft. About as ridiculous as a man flying in the sky with the birds. Well, today we have a behemoth industry in which the average dairy cow produces over 20,000 lbs of milk per lactation. We have better management, better genetics and better nutrition to thank for all that milk.

One of the things dairy farmers have had endlessly drummed into their consciousness in recent decades is the importance of getting their cows to reach maximum milk peaks at the onset of lactation. Nutritionists, feed salesmen, extension agents, veterinarians, accountants, bankers, semen salesmen and even hoof trimmers all get on the bandwagon of encouraging high milk peaks – because, theoretically, the more milk your cows give, the better your chances of staying in business tend to be. Of course, all those aforementioned professionals have a very biased financial stake in a dairy farm’s financial health.

The most costly area of management on a dairy farm after feeding is raising or purchasing replacements. Beginning with the newborn calf, all the way to the freshening first-calf heifer, having replacements ready to enter the herd is a necessary part of the dairy’s herd cycle, and they represent the future of the dairy’s profit potential. It’s been well documented that replacement heifers that enter the herd between 22 and 24 months old can optimize profitable milk production. Other studies have shown that a baby calf that can double its birthweight by 60 days old will be much more productive over its lifetime.

One of the foundational elements of successful and profitable commercial dairy farming is the continuous entry of fresh cows into a milking herd. The fresh cow that’s in proper health will be the most cost-efficient cow on the dairy – having the highest feed-conversion-to-milk- production efficiency. Herd profiles that show low days in milk (DIM) indicate there are more cows freshening in a herd than there are cows headed for the dry corral. Even in the most desperate of economies, fresh cows are critical to keeping the business solvent.

Since the middle of the 20th Century, the U.S. dairy industry has embraced corn silage as the No. 1 most economical and energy-dense forage fed to cows and heifers. Many millions of acres are planted in silage corn every year and many billions of pounds of corn are harvested and put up as silage in horizontal and vertical storage systems.