Five tips for managing rising health costs in dairy herds

Sit down and take a step back from your farm – look at all the different areas, from heifer calves and bull calves, to dry cows and milking cows. What diseases are impacting your animals? Which group of animals is worst affected? And what is this costing you?

With calf pneumonia, for example, farmers tend to only count the cost of medicines when thinking about how much the disease is costing them. What they don’t realise, or count, is their own time or labour in treating the animal, and the fact that the animal may lose weight, cost more to feed, and won’t thrive in the same way as its cohorts.

It’s important to understand how the disease levels on your farm – whether it be cases of mastitis per 100 cows or levels of pneumonia in calves – compares to other farms.

This can be quite a daunting task so give your vet a call – it’s a no-brainer. They will have been around a lot of other farms in the area and will know the disease targets you should be aiming for.

When it comes to discussions around disease and animal health, you need to be open and honest with your vet.

This will help you identify the biggest problems and what needs to be done to tackle them now. You can then develop a preventative health plan.

Keeping animals healthy is multifactorial and relies on six areas – good husbandry, the right accommodation, good nutrition, hygiene, breeding and vaccination. Those six things all need to be right for the system to work optimally.

Farmers should consider following the National Office of Animal Health (NOAH) guidelines, which encourage vaccination against a range of ‘category one’ diseases. For the dairy sector, these are BVD, IBR, Leptospiriosis, bovine respiratory disease (BRD) and calf scour.

Vaccination is a hugely important way of helping to prevent disease problems in your herd. It can sometimes be hard to convince someone to vaccinate their cattle for a disease they don’t have right now, but if their neighbours have it or there’s a high level of the disease in the area generally, it’s only a matter of time before they get it.
 

In the past we didn’t always realise how important it is to get youngstock off to a good start, by keeping them healthy and getting them growing well.

Calf scour and pneumonia have a huge impact on growth rates, and good growth rates are key to getting heifers served by 15 months to then calf down at 24 months.

And if a heifer does get pneumonia and recovers, she will probably give 10% less milk when she comes to lactate than if she had not had pneumonia. Future lost production is one of the hidden costs of disease.