Assessing the economic benefits of once-a-day milking

Abstract

New Zealand dairy farmers have adopted twice-a-day (TAD) milking, and accept that it provides the economically optimum rate of milk removal. The big commitment of labour in the process of twice-a-day milking has a major impact on the lifestyle of the milkers. Recently, once-a-day (OAD) milking throughout the whole season has emerged in New Zealand with the main objective of reducing the time involved in milk harvesting. As long as labour is one of the biggest components of the farm working expenses, the amount of labour saved in this area may strongly influence the profitability of OAD procedure. The problem with OAD milking is that, despite labour and other cost savings, there is a decrease in milk production of some cows. Recent trials showed that the average loss of milk solids production of Friesian cows was approximately 29% and 20% for Jersey cows. However, those trials showed that there is a wide variation between individual cows on OAD milking, illustrating that there is a gap for genetic improvement of cows suitable for OAD milking.

The overall objective of this research was to determine the profitability of OAD systems regarding different milk yield losses, identifying the effects of each OAD system on farm management practices, such as stocking rate, calving date and supplementary feed strategies. The milk production was established according to the possible losses in milk production, specifically, 29%, 20%, 10% and 0% for Friesians, and 20%, 10% and 0% for Jersey cows. The Friesian milk production levels of 20%, 10% and 0% losses represented future cows, which due to genetic improvement of OAD cows, are expected to be producing more under OAD conditions in the future than the current OAD cows. Similar facts were attributed to the Jerseys with 10% and no loss.

The first set of results was obtained at milk solids payout of $4.20/kg MS and labour costed at $12/hour. The physical results showed that the stocking rates of both Friesian and Jersey cows increased on OAD systems in comparison to the TAD systems. These increases in stocking rate were attributed mainly to the lower milk solids production of OAD cows in related to the TAD cows. Despite the increase in the stocking rate of OAD systems, it was not possible to compensate for losses in milk solids production per cow, and therefore, there was a decrease in milk production per hectare in all situations where cow production was reduced. Regarding the planned start of calving, the model showed that there is no need to change the date when switching from TAD to OAD milking.

The financial results showed that dairy farmers who have recently changed to OAD milk removal with herds showing about 29% and 20% losses are facing a moderate increase in the average costs of milk production of about 15% and 6%, respectively. It also showed that OAD systems with 10% losses of milk production per cow had a small decrease in these average costs, while the systems for which production per cow is unaffected by OAD milking had a reasonable decrease in the average costs of production of over 10%. In terms of profitability, the results showed that the earnings before interest on fixed capital and tax (EBIT) was approximately the same for TAD and OAD systems with cows decreasing approximately 10% milk solids production. The final discussion showed that if is possible to breed a Friesian and Jersey cow totally suitable to OAD milking, the gains in productivity are going to be 6.0% and 6.8%, respectively, which are considerably important in an industry where success relies on having lower costs of milk production than other countries.