DSD 3.3 | Financial Resilience – the individual cow effect

Dairy Science Digest

Positive Profit. Every herd is chasing financial resilience. It is especially relevant on our minds having just completed our schedule Fs and planning for 2022 planting season.

Have you ever wondered the lifetime profit of a cow in your herd? How about the average break even for each cow in the herd? Dr. Hadrich was raised on a dairy and questioned the impact of these individual cow differences. To answer these questions, she and her team took on-farm quickbook financials and merged them with individual cattle DHIA data from 67 Minnesota herds. This information maps out the cow-level cumulative lifetime break-even impact on financial assessment.

Individual cow lifetime profit between “resilient” and “non-resilient” herds is compared. Lifetime expenses varied substantially, between the two. These differences were found across farm sizes, heifer development costs, lifetime feed and “non-feed” expenses (which includes labor).

Listen in to hear how you can assess the financial resilience of your herd!

The full article is found at: https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(22)00137-0/fulltext

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