FROM THE FARM REPORT: WHAT’S HAPPENING ON THE FARM

Our wonderful team here at Miner Institute has achieved something pretty incredible! According to our last DHI test, our herd has a Rolling Herd Average of a little over 33,000! That's over 55,000 pounds of fluid milk produced by our herd each day! We also recently received an award for the high quality of our milk, presented to us by Agri-Mark, our milk cooperative. The herd is doing well, we are currently milking around 580 cows and maintaining 4.4% fat and 3.3% protein levels in our milk.

We are members of the Holstein Association USA, Inc. As members of the company our herd is a part of the Standard program, which means that we evaluate most of our lactating cows. The classifier will judge each cow on 20 different traits which will be calculated into its final score. The traits are split into 5 main categories: front end and capacity, dairy strength, rump, feet and legs, and most importantly, the mammary system. We then use this information along with other factors to help us mate the cows, help decide what animals to keep vs. sell, as well as to help identify some of the animals that we will show at the fair. It’s also a good benchmark to see how far we have come over the years in genomic improvement with the herd.

Our herd scored an average of 103.6 BAA (Breed Age Average). 2.1% of cows scored excellent, 24.1% scored very good, 51.4% scored good plus, 21% scored good, and 1.4% scored fair.

As the weather gets colder we have to pay even more attention to how the animals are housed and bedded, especially the heifers. For the young calves, in addition to the sawdust and straw they normally lay in, they wear calf jackets to help protect them from the cold or any cold drift. These are adjustable jackets, and they typically wear them until 6 weeks of age. For our older calves and heifers we just add more sawdust to their pen so that they can bed down deeper. Unfortunately, with the cold weather comes ice. To prevent slipping and falling we sprinkle granulated lime on the cross alleys when necessary, as well as when we are moving animals around the barn.

Happy Holidays!

— Rebecca Sprang

rsprang@whminer.com