Persistence pays off for Canadian dairy farm

Over the last three years the Loewith family, of Summitholm Holsteins, has made three significant changes to its cow management strategy and reaped the benefits. Hannah Noble reports.

The Loewith family, which milks 500 Holsteins under the Summitholm prefix in Ontario, Canada, has focused on making improvements to cow comfort, which has had a positive impact on the business' bottom line.

Speaking at a webinar hosted by Semex, Ben Loewith explained that his family's dairy business had a mission statement, which included the desire to meet the needs of 鈥榚very cow, every day'.

He said: "Animal welfare is of paramount importance. We believe that doing what we can to improve cow comfort or alleviate stress will eventually pay for itself."

Mr Loewith, who farms with his father, Carl, and uncle, Dave, said that while it was difficult to calculate a return on investment for improvements made to cow comfort, he said he believed that any changes made would be money well spent in the long run.

He explained the particular area of focus for him and his team had been the milking parlour settings and the farm's maternity barn. He said he also sought out advice on how to deal with corkscrew claws in heifers, which had been a growing problem within the herd.

CHANGE OF PARLOUR SETTINGS

MR Loewith said somatic cell counts (SCC), which had been running at around 250,000 cells/ml for years, was an issue he had been struggling to bring under control for a number of years.

He said: "We did not get a lot of clinical mastitis cases but we could not get the SCC down below 200,000 cells/ml no matter what we did."

He said they tried numerous changes to teat dip and preparation routine but nothing seemed to make any difference.

"We even had training sessions where vets came in to provide training on protocols to ensure no one was taking any shortcuts, but it was not making any difference."

However, he said he thought part of the problem was to do with teat end damage which was significant throughout the herd.

He said: "Once they get to this point, no amount of good protocols are going to get the teat clean enough to make it an aseptic environment when the milker unit is being put on.

They invited different milking machine companies and experts on-farm to try and help out with the problem, but the solution finally came following two major changes made to the settings of the parlour pulsation rates.

"We changed the time the machine spent on each phase of milking. We dramatically decreased the B phase of the pulsation - the time when the liner is open and the cow is being milked - from 582 milliseconds open to 510 milliseconds open."

They also changed the liners to a vented liner. Previously the claw itself was vented.

From the point they made the changes there was a steady decline in cell count and they now sit between 80 and 120,000 cells/ml.

A purpose-built maternity unit for the close-up dry cows was built two years ago.听

CLOSE-UP DRY COW FACILITY

Two years ago the family put up a purpose-built maternity unit for the close-up dry cows. Mr Loewith said before this the close-up dry cows were in cubicles from three weeks before calving and moved into an adjacent straw yard just before calving.

He said: "Sometimes we were too early moving them in there and they would end up spending a-day-and-a-half or two days in the straw yard because they were not actually as close to calving as we thought. Other times we were too late and the calf would be born in the manure alley."

He said the old shed provided an unstable social group for the cows. Because there was only one group, cows were constantly being moved in and out of the group changing the dynamic weekly.

"There is good research which shows for two to three days after introducing a new cow lying and eating patterns are disrupted."

He said in the new maternity shed all cows that were three to four weeks away from calving were moved into a pen of about eight to 12 animals. He said no more animals would be introduced to that group until they had all calved in an effort to keep the social group stable throughout the last part of gestation. 听

He said: "There are man-passes between each pen for people to walk through without having to climb over gates. When we are walking through the pens we do not want to be walking through the feed alley and looking in. I wanted to make sure we could get right in among the cows to get a good look at them."

He added that the cows went on to to calve in the same pen and said he had found this 鈥榤uch easier' on the cows. "We are now seeing fewer assisted calvings. We probably assist one-in-20 calvings now."

Rumination collars

Mr Loewith said the cow were fitted with rumination collars two weeks prior to calving and these were 鈥榠nvaluable'.

"I find the collars pick up on compromised fresh cows much faster than we can through observation alone. And we can then monitor if a treatment has been successful."

Mr Loewith said the changes made in the new maternity unit had led to the peak milk yield of the mature cows four weeks post-calving increasing from 54kg to 60kg. He added there had been a large decrease in stillbirth rate from 7 per cent to 2 per cent in the mature cows and from 11 per cent to 2 per cent in the heifers.

He said: "In my mind this was all down to those stable social groups and not moving them right at the time of calving or stressing them moving them into a pen on their own."

RUBBER FLOORING FOR HEIFERS

The third change the family made was to install rubber matting in the feed passage in the heifer sheds. This was driven by a surge in corkscrew claws in heifers as young as nine months old.

Mr Loewith said: "We got to the point where some of them were non-weight bearing on the outside claw.

"It was decided it was a malformation of the bone during the growth stage and could not be corrected by trimming."

He said he thought factors contributing to this growth in corkscrew claws were sand bedding, wide concrete grooving, locking head yokes and overcrowding. 听

Pressure

To try and alleviate the problem, rubber mats were put down over the concrete to take some of the pressure off the feet during the growing period.

Mr Loewith said: "Anecdotally there seems to be significant improvement but it is not a silver bullet. We are still seeing animal reach 24 months old with some degree of the corkscrew. We might still have to look for some other solutions."