Different approach to dry cow management pays off for Hants farmer

Cutting the dry period to just 35 days has simplified dry cow diets and reduced the incidence of milk fever from 8% to 0.5% for one 280-cow Hants herd.  It has also put an extra 400 litres/cow into the bulk tank – worth £72 at a standard 18ppl milk price.

Paul Newland, who manages Andrew Martin’s 9500-litre herd at Church Farm in Lasham, Hants also reports that retained cleansings have halved to 5% (including cows calving twins).  Also cows are happier because they undergo fewer social and nutritional changes at such a key time.  “Basically, they don’t like change,” says Mr Newland, who first read about the concept in a US magazine in 2003.

He was originally interested in the concept to assist with reducing metabolic problems but was also interested in research which showed cows on short dry periods cycled earlier after calving.

“So, in 2004, we dried off all the cows to give them a 28-day dry period.  But within a month we found this wasn’t long enough; there will always be cows calving five or six days earlier and dry periods of just 21 days lead to a drop in milk yield,” he explains.

Instead, he settled on a flexible 35 to 40 days according to the individual cow and whether the drying off date falls on a weekend.

“You will get 10% of the herd that won’t conform: whether they slip a calf, have twins, or need to be dried off early because they are lame.  Then we resort to the more conventional 60 days dry, if not more.”

Milk yield benefits were not reported as being great in the US article Mr Newland originally read, but what he found was an increase of 400 litres/cow without affecting subsequent lactation performance.

“This is based on an extra 16 litres/day for the 25 days longer in milk.  We didn’t, however, see cows cycling any earlier; when we dropped down to twice a day milking, we did spot more cows bulling.”

Simplifying diets by only feeding one ration was a big bonus.  Calving all year round, Mr Newland found running two dry cow groups with separate diets became complicated.  The first five weeks were spent on rough pasture (or straw and maize gluten in winter) then cows were brought in for the last three weeks onto the transition diet.  “The problem was making sure they were on it for long enough to benefit. They need four weeks, but sometimes if we were tight on space, it was only two weeks.”

Now the herd is fed a TMR containing the same ingredients as the milking ration (apart from protected fat and brewers grains), just in a different ratio.  There is more forage – haylage, maize and either grass silage in winter or zero grazed grass in summer – and less concentrate. “The other big benefit is that we no longer have cows giving 30 litres/day when we are trying to dry them off. Instead their yields are more like 10-15 litres/day and cow condition is better, generally by 0.5 of a score, as they eat the milking ration for longer,” he says.

This will be Mr Newland’s fourth year of managing short dry periods and he has changed little, apart from dry cow tube switching to Cephaguard® DC when it became licensed for 35 days. This means cows are fully protected from mastitis when dry, without risking an overlong milk withdrawal period.

Shortening the dry period, however, doesn’t mean taking short cuts in management.  Mr Newland emphasises it needs attention to detail and extremely good record keeping.