Below are the latest Monthly Dairy Costings from Kingshay. It’s worth delving into the numbers to see where the opportunities for more margin lie.
What is noticeable, is that purchased feed use remains significant at 0.36kg/litre. A lower milk price hasn’t dampened the need to feed.
Even though feed cost has fallen by £50/t, feed at 12.65ppl is still accounting for around 1/3rd of the milk cheque (see below).
As shown in the chart below, the feed rate is pretty much the same every November! Is it time this changed?
There are many reasons why feed rate might be sticky in November. Feel free to add/discuss in the comments:
- Diets need more purchased feed to get the cows to milk due to silage quality.
- Stale and/or barren cows are being kept milking for longer and still getting fed in-parlour, as well as eating PMR which includes blend. There is a value to this given the barrener price.
- Cow grouping isn’t optimised. Lots of cows in milk, with fresh calved heifers joining the herd also. Perhaps more barrier space needed or grouping etc.
- Marginal litres – Is feed still delivering a margin?
- Traditional approach – Just following the same model as last year.
- Forage dry matter intakes could be higher.
Forage DMI
A quick back-calculation to check forage DMI from these average results, might go like this:
Milk From Forage = 6.7 litres * 5.5MJ/L (due to F&P quality) = 37MJ
Add maintainance at 80MJ = 117MJ divided by silage ME at 11.2MJ = 10.5kgDMI.
It’s a handy quick check versus what you expect to be feeding.
The chart below shows a range of farms from their November costings. This data-set shows the range of possibilities for more forage DMI.
Replacing 1.0kg of purchased feed with 1.2-1.5kg forage dry matter (if the cows have the appetite, capacity etc.) could be worth over 1.0ppl (>£2k extra MOPF for the herd for the month). Worth a revisit?
Silage quality varies hugely. Some aspects of silage making we cannot control, but some bits we can. If your silages aren’t currently what they need to be to drive more efficiency in the diet, what’s needed for the next crop?
N.B. For the farms with very low forage DMI on the back calculation, this is caused because the purchased feed is assumed to be fully utilised when calculating Milk From Forage (MFF). This can lead to MFF being negative in some cases.