The poor, lowly penny, often ignored, forgotten, and discarded, but when present in numbers, they have surprising power, even on dairies. At current Class III prices, a penny’s worth of milk is about 1.6 tablespoons. That sounds like nothing (it’s less than an ounce), yet for a dairy that milks 100 cows, just one extra penny per cow per day is $365 in a year. For a 1,000 cow dairy, it’s $3,650. For a dairy milking 3,500 cows, it adds up to a whopping $12,775 per year! Less spending adds up the same way that selling more does. Looking for ways to save pennies pays off too!
Feed accounts for at least half of all production costs, so it is the ideal place to start. For instance, are you continuing to feed cows that should have been beefed last week or last month? How do you know exactly where that break-even point is? Feeding cull cows for even a few days can become very costly over a year’s time. One way of combating this problem is to start with your testing company.
How accurate is the data that your testing company is providing? Accuracy is only achieved through dependable people inputting dependable data. Don’t be fooled by an adjustment made after milking to match daily milk volume sent to the co-op. Individual cow data is extremely important to achieve an accurate cull list. Feeding only the cows that pay for their feed is a brilliant idea!
Arizona DHIA is committed to helping you achieve this goal by providing you with data integrity on every cow, every time. Pennies add up to dollars very quickly! Call us to see if we can be of help to you at (602) 882-1230. Remember that Arizona DHIA is a nonprofit company owned by you the dairy farmer.
Here at Arizona DHIA, we strive to set a standard of integrity and accuracy in all of our tests that come through our labs: Components, Microbiology and in our field testing!