Last summer I participated in a tour at 4 Cubs Farm near Grantsburg, Wisconsin. 4 Cubs is a 16-unit Lely barn. It is owned by Gary, Cris, and Ben Peterson. Nathan Brandt is the dairy herd manager. There are a lot of things to be impressed with at 4 Cubs, but what stuck in my mind was the strategy for starting fresh cows and training heifers. I checked back with Nathan a few weeks ago because a Cow Corner customer was considering using a fresh pen.
All of the cows are milked in robots. The barn has 8 pens with 2 robots per pen. Each pen has a special-needs area with free access back to the robots. New heifers are distributed through all the special needs pens at freshening. Heifers in the special-needs area have easy access to the robots with minimal interference from boss cows. They can be fetched to the robot efficiently, 4 times a day, without disrupting a whole pen of cows. Because the heifers are distributed over several pens, they don’t take up a lot of robot time in any one pen. And, they are trained on both left-hand and right-hand robots. Heifers stay in the special-needs pens for about 10 days.
When the heifers leave the special needs pens, they go to the fresh pen. Mature cows and heifers are comingled in the fresh pen until 30 days in milk. This allows time for convenient health monitoring. It also makes it easy to include fresh cow supplements in the diet. The fresh pen is understocked with a maximum of 100 cows on 2 robots. This ensures that fresh cows always have access to free stalls, feed bunks, and robots. The goal for the fresh pen is 3.4 to 3.5 milkings and 2.5 refusals. While the industry prefers separate fresh pens for mature cows and heifers, comingling has worked well, and makes the best use of available robots and stalls at 4 Cubs. Heifers are pretrained before they have to compete with mature cows. Mature cows under 30 days in milk are usually less aggressive than those that have been milking longer. Trained mature cows may even help the heifers learn to use the robots. Heifers at 4 Cubs average over 79 pounds and 3 visits through their first 100 days in milk.
Is it really worth all those pen moves to give the heifers a good start? The chart at left compares how heifers contribute to daily milk production as a hypothetical herd works to improve from 85 pounds per cow to 95 pounds per cow. This example herd is 35% heifers and 65% mature cows. Scenario 1 is the 85-pound starting point where heifers produce 80% of mature cows, or 73 and 91 pounds respectively. In scenario 2, production increased proportionally for both cows and heifers – the average is 95 pounds with cows contributing 102 pounds and heifers contributing 81 pounds. In scenario 3, the cows improved to 102 pounds – the same as scenario 2 – but the heifers stayed the same and the result was that the herd only reached 92 pounds. Scenario 4 shows that if the heifers stay at 73 pounds, the cows will have to contribute 106 pounds to reach the 95-pound goal.
The bottom line, it’s a lot harder to improve herd average production if you leave the heifers behind. Getting that extra production from heifers will require better training and more visits.
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