Flexible Milking, Ben Wilson (Canterbury)

• Overall, it has been a pretty good season. We will be looking to finish up around 4% ahead of last year's production, and the cows are in pretty good nick going into winter.
• We started feeding fodder beet on 25 March to help keep intakes up while also protecting our pasture covers, as growth has been slower through the autumn with dry/cool weather.
• We switched to OAD milking on Monday 17 May as covers began to get closer to dry off levels, and to help pull the cows back as we prepare for dry off.
• We are sitting at dry-off covers now, so looking to dry off this coming week. We are trying to balance feed demand as we don’t have heaps of winter feed, so we don’t want to send them off too early, but also don’t want to eat into calving pasture covers.
• We are still getting high SCC sitting at an average of 205 for the season. We haven’t helped this over past years as have not culled on SCC as we have been keeping as many animals as possible to help grow the herd for the Kahautara farm as we were converting.
• SCC also hasn’t been a large focus for me or the team. I do want to increase focus on this for the next season, and I think through both more selective culling this year and having it as part of our regular team catch-ups, this will bring some more awareness which should be a good starting point.
• The condition of the cows is pretty good – we are condition scoring this week with the vet to get an indication of where they are sitting and pull out any lighter-looking ones to target feed.
• The team has really enjoyed the 10-in-7 milking and this has been key for our farm and given us the confidence to lock in dates for next season.
• Our aim will be to do something similar, going 3-in-2 in early Jan, as soon as we stop SGL mating/AI. We will then switch to 3-in-2, as we have seen that the cows can continue to produce, whilst also gaining benefits in the animals and the team.
• However, we know that the staff love 10-in-7, as we can milk that slight bit earlier on the PM milkings (2.30pm vs 4.30pm, which is more in line with TAD milking times), and they can be home earlier, plus it is a weekly rotation, so we will be changing to 10-i-n7 from March.
• We are also looking into the option of OAD, 3-in-2 or 10-in-7 during August to help ease workload around the busy calving time, and give the cows time to recover from calving.

• We had our final scanning on 29 March, with a confirmed 6-week in-calf rate of 65% and a not-in-calf rate of 13%, which compares to 68 and 17 last year.
• When we switched to 3-in-2 in Mid-Jan, we adopted a 12-18-18 hour milking interval, milking at 4.30am, 4.30pm and 10.30am.
• After looking further at what others have been doing, we decided to switch to 11-18-19, milking at 5am, 4pm and 10am, making the twice-milking day shorter and more favourable or our staff. It was great to see that we could do this without having an impact on production.
• After seeing this change, and with a slight drop in production as the season has continued, chose to move to 10-in-7 in early March.
• Having trialled this, and seeing both the people benefits, and the fact that we have not seen an impact on our production through tweaking these intervals, I feel that flexible milking is a win-win situation for both staff and cows. It has given us the confidence to set specific times to switch in future years, rather than using a production cut off. We are still discussing the option to switch to 3-in-2 earlier in the season.
• With 10-in-7 we have two 21-hour intervals over the weekend where we only milk once per day. To make grazing simple for staff over the weekends, we have chosen to allocate a 24-hour feed to the cows on both intervals.
• We were 13% up in production for March and 4% up season to date.
• I have found it a lot simpler when on 10-in-7, as each week is the same, in terms of planning farm visits, evening activities with the family etc. as there is no second guessing how many milkings will be on that day.
• We started feeding fodder beet on platform 10 days ago, which will help to increase feed allocation, take pressure off the pasture covers and allow the cows to have adequate energy to maintain condition going into late lactation.
• We still have a large focus on residuals and ensuring that we check in if we are feeding cows enough or too much and adjust accordingly.
• Earlier this year we were short staffed and changed the roster from 7-2-7-3 to 6-2, to help alleviate the workload over weekends with more people off. We are back to full staff allocation, and with only one milking a day over the weekend with 10-in-7, we have found that there is a lot less weekend workload and are considering switching back to 7-2-7-3.

• We made the switch from TAD to 3-in-2 on 15 Jan
• TAD milking times were 4.45am and 1.45pm
• We changed via transition to the following schedule to get to 12-18-18
  • Day 1: 4.30am, 6pm
  • Day 2: 11am
  • Day 3: 4.30am, 5pm
  • Day 4: 10.30am
  • 12-18-18 after that: 4.30am : 4.30pm : 10.30am
• The change date was largely dictated by the end of our mating period, as we used short gestation at the end – we switched after our last day of this.
• Going earlier than this would have had conflicts with our AI technician, and we were still producing around 2.0kgMS/cow/day – which we wanted to be lower than this when we switched.

• After our last update, the farm started drying out, and growth rates fell well below expected levels, while at the same time the rotation length sped up. We had to start putting supplement in to help extend the round length and give the pasture a chance to get ahead.
• Nitrogen has also been applied following the cows with 32kgN/ha.
• The supplement has allowed us to continue to feed our cows well and we have maintained production around 2.0kgMS/cow/day.
• A combination of PKE and baleage was used to help fill this gap.
• We started mating on 20th Oct, with 2 cows left to calve.

The coming 4-6 weeks will be largely focused on mating, as well as weaning calves and keeping ahead with irrigation.

Over this period, we will also be confirming our strategy for when and how we will change to 3-in-2. 

• The season has been going well so far, when compared with previous years. Good winter growth has made things simple and helped us to bounce back from a lower pasture cover at dry off.
• Milk production season to date is up 6.7% compared to last season.
• We milk our colostrum cows on OAD and have moved them to be milked in the afternoon this year, whereas previously have done them in the morning. The staff find this much simpler, with penicillin cows coming in the morning only, there has been less confusion of what milk to put where.
• Animal health has been relatively good to date:
  • 12 down cows
  • 3 lameness cases to date
  • Mastitis – we have noticed some more early season mastitis this year, mainly in the heifers. We have put this down to the fact that where they were wintered this year, we did not have access to yards, so were not able to teat seal them like we normally do.
• Cows grazed fodder beet on platform over winter, and then spent 2 weeks on kale before going back to grass for calving. The herd was split into 3 for this, with ~200 cows changing at once, based on calving date. Ben feels this has helped the cows transition off beet better and had a positive impact on their animal health compared with previous years.
• Somatic cell count has always been high on this farm, and we are making more of an effort to try and get that down with aim of being below 150.
• Some straw has been fed out to the springers fed at 3-4kg/cow/day for the firsts few weeks of calving. Further supplement has not been needed yet due to good growth over winter, reaching target average pasture covers and cows grazing to good residuals.
• Staff were on a 6-1 roster over calving, and changed to their regular roster of 7-2-7-2-7-3 on 7 Sep.
• N applications so far include:
  • 69ha receiving Super & FlexiN at a rate of 18kgN/ha during August
  • A further 69ha receiving DAP at a rate of 29kgN during the first half September.

Our focus for the next 4-6 weeks is around monitoring and maintaining pasture quality, and preparing the cows and staff for mating.