- Dr. Jones attended Michigan State University
and received his Bachelor in Dairy Science degree
and then his Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine in 1997.
He practiced Dairy Performance Medicine in Wisconsin
for 22 years,
and then also served as a Technical Service Specialist
for Monsanto Dairy for three years.
Currently, Dr. Jones is an independent
Dairy Performance Consultant and a partner
of the Central Sands Dairy
in Adams County.
He also works for Quality Milk Sales
as a Production Consulting Specialist
and is a nutritionist for a consortium of large dairies.
Dr. Jones designed Fair Oaks Dairy in Indiana,
a dairy farm that you're probably familiar with,
with more than 20,000 dairy cows.
Gordie has consulted with dairy producers
and veterinarians both across United States
and internationally on dairy herd performance, nutrition,
cow environment, dairy housing expansion, dairy management,
standard operating procedures, cow comfort
and has placed considerable emphasis on housing designed
to keep cows clean, dry and comfortable.
Dr. Jones has received the Merial Excellence
in Preventive Medicine Award for Dairy
by the American Association of Bovine Practitioners,
which is considered the highest honor by the AABP.
Gordie and his wife, Mary,
have been married for 40 years and have three children.
So please join me in welcoming Dr. Gordie Jones
back to Waupaca County.
(applause)
- This does feel a little strange to come back home.
It's Weyauwega, Waupaca County, our home.
It's certainly where I learned to be a dairy vet
and punished a lot of your cows while I learned.
So I'll back up for a minute.
Today we're going to talk about
Achieving Excellence in Dairy.
I want to go "How do we get past 100 pounds?"
Today, we have dairymen in the room that can get
to 100 pounds average on a cow.
The dairymen that I spent 22 years with in Oconto County,
they used to say, "If you can't get to 85 pounds,
"that was the easy milk, falling off a log."
So how do we get past the "easy milk"?
How do we get past 80 pounds?
How do we get past 90?
How do we get a cow to do what she really can do?
As you heard Greg Blonde talk, I spent 15 years
being a real dairy vet, fixing broken cows
and having a great time.
I spent 10 years consulting in dairy nutrition, facility,
cow comfort consulting.
Then I went on to three years with the evil empire,
with Monsanto.
And in that role, I designed Fair Oaks Dairy.
Today, the Fair Oaks empire down there
has about 65,000 cows at the visitors' center
in a ten-mile circle.
I then designed and built my own dairy farm
in Juneau County.
So just across the river on the other side,
Adams-Juneau, side by side, and Nekoosa.
I spent five years managing that dairy,
and now I'm consulting again.
I guess the best you can see is that I can't hold a job.
(laughing)
I've got about a five-year attention span,
and then I have to move on to something else.
And as long as it was within dairying,
I can still have a ball.
So that's what I've been doing.
These are the dairies in our home state.
The red ones are the CAFOs, over 700 cows;
the green, the darker green, is the density of cows.
I'm going to use my dairy a little bit as an example,
that achieving excellence is size neutral.
It doesn't matter what size dairy we have,
whether we have 20 cows at home or 2,000.
It just doesn't matter.
We're going to take something.
I see the Lisowes here.
When I designed Fair Oaks Dairies,
I brought the owners that were going to own
Fair Oaks Dairies, I brought them to Gary Lisowe's Dairy
with 25 cows and said if they can't do what Lisowe's
are doing, a 65,000 cell count,
top milk for the Brown Swiss breed in the state,
if you can't do what they're doing,
keep it this clean, dry and comfortable,
I didn't want to have anything to do with Fair Oaks.
And I had two owners that were committed
to taking as good a care as the Lisowe's did.
So it doesn't matter what size.
There's some irony in my life.
The true irony was I escaped Michigan to come to Wisconsin
because I hated freestalls.
1977, I left the state of Michigan
because it looked like you'd taken a cow,
you had dipped her in manure,
and you were going to deep-fry her.
You couldn't get more poo on a cow with a trowel.
So I came to Waupaca County to see cows in tie-stalls.
Today I'm one of the world's experts in freestalls,
but I came here because of tie-stalls.
So my heart is still in a dairyman who has 25 to 60 cows
in a tie-stall.
I now realize we can keep them better in a freestall,
or keep them as well in a freestall,
and now size starts to take over.
All of the dairies in Wisconsin are all over here.
As I used to practice here in Waupaca County
and then up in Oconto County,
I used to cross the middle of the state and wonder,
"What a desert, what a hole!"
And suddenly, I put my dairy in the middle of that hole.
I often thought, if this state was going to, anyway,
it was an amazingly bald spot in the state.
Nekoosa is a very strange spot.
I was in Nekoosa last September
when I got the dairy built there.
I saw a sign that said Ice Fishing Practice.
And it was at 7 o'clock, September in the high school,
and I had to go see what ice fishing practice in Nekoosa
looked like in September.
Well, that's ice fishing practice.
(laughter)
They were getting ready for a big day
out on Lake Petenwell.
Anyway, you can tell it's at the high school
because there's no beer next to the buckets.
If it were in the church gym, there would've been beer.
Okay.
Paul Fricke at the University of Wisconsin said it best,
"The last 25 years, the dairy industry
"can best be described as changed."
I came to Waupaca County to see these farms, these 25 cows.
We let them out in the summer to graze,
whether they were Jerseys or Holsteins.
We had tie-stall barns.
We had brought wind-tunnels into tie-stall barns
for mechanical ventilation at first.
And then today, dairy farms have continued to get bigger.
For me and you, I see it this way.
I see the average dairymen will double their dairy size
four times in their life.
Well, when it was 25 to 50 to 100, to 200 cows,
pretty simple.
Now it's become 100 to 200 to 400 to 800,
and then 1,600 and 3,200.
About four doublings in the average lifetime
of a dairyman.
And dairies are getting bigger.
I've been a member of the Red Barn Club since 1977.
They're in Waupaca and Weyauwega in Oconto County.
Today, this is home.
This is Central Sands.
We'll talk about it in a minute.
Remember we're here today because we love cows.
Everybody in this room,
our livings are dependent on this cow,
and I want to talk about her for a few minutes,
just to set the stage.
So while the world is telling us
they're causing global warming,
while cows are causing all these other problems,
no biosphere works without a cow.
She was born during the last Ice Age.
She belongs to a group of animals called
Pleistocene megafauna.
Means really big animal from the Ice Age.
The woolly mammoth, the hairy rhinoceros, the giant sloth,
our dairy cow is one of those Ice Age animals.
I usually ask a dairyman today as they leave here
to take one of your cows, perhaps your best cow,
invite her into your house tonight.
Let her lay on the couch.
Give her the remote control.
Bring a little bit of TMR in for her,
and then ask her the one question you want to be asked.
The one question is: what temperature does she want
the house set at?
You've got it set at 68,
or if you're in my house I think it's set at 84.
(laughter)
But, thermal neutral for people is about 70 degrees,
68 to 72; that's our thermal neutral.
What is the cow's favorite temperature?
Not what range does she live in,
but what's her favorite temperature?
So I got a 55. I got a 62.
I'm going to be like an auctioneer: 62, no, I've got to get to 55.
I've got to go lower.
- [Voiceover] 40. - 40, 40's going to win.
We'll sell it at 40.
Her favorite temperature is just above freezing.
Just last week, our whole deer season,
we shut every barn in Wisconsin and went after the herd.
And when we went after the deer herd,
every dairy was shut and every cow,
we were still above 40 degrees.
They were going, "Give us some air!"
Her favorite temperature, she was born during the Ice Age
and her favorite temperature is just above freezing.
As soon as it breaks in freezing,
when we were building the first free-stalls
in Oconto County, I used to give out Heartworm stickers
to my dairymen.
And I would give them 30 or 40 Heartworm stickers.
And they would look at me like this and go, "What are these?"
And I'd go, "They go on the calendar
"every day you have your dairy closed."
And they said, "Well, you only gave me 40."
I said, "Yup, and when you run out of them,
"you have to open your barn."
What I want you to think is, is today a day
I want my dairy closed?
And if we're above 32,
it's a day she would rather have it open.
You'd like it closed, you'd like the wind blocked,
but she wants it open.
So her favorite temperature, which means her best intake,
is happening at 40 degrees.
So she was born during the last Ice Age.
The very first farmers were in Mesopotamia.
That is the land between the rivers.
Today, it's modern day Iraq.
That land, those first farmers discovered
the large headed grains: wheat, barley, triticale.
And when they discovered those grains,
they took a stick in the sand, they dragged it.
And with a little water, they were farming.
That's all it took to make a furrow,
and that's when agriculture started, about 5,000 years ago.
Our first fences were built to keep the wild cows out.
She wanted what we were growing.
So she opened the gate.
I've often said, I'm going to give one talk once
of what I've seen in Oconto and Waupaca County
on the different gate latches you've designed.
You've designed enough gate latches where I've seen
two men and a boy lock heifers in.
And as soon as you turn your back,
two heifers can get it open and follow you out.
Well, she opened the gate, and we now had a cow.
And the cow made a covenant with us.
That cow made a covenant that said,
if you take care of me, I'll take care of you.
And that's when animal agriculture started.
And it started 5,000 years ago in the Middle East.
We've only been able to successfully domesticate
about 11 species.
The cow is the star of all those species.
As we came out of the Middle East,
we went both east into Asia and we went west into Europe.
As we came into the eastern part of Europe,
we could not break the sod
that was there without the power of the cow.
She became that Ford 8N that goes 96 miles an hour.
Holy cow!
I own a Ford 8N, and I can't imagine it
at 12 miles an hour.
Scares the heck out of me to decide I'd try it
and try it at 90.
But anyway, she broke the sod.
We used her as a tractor.
She provided the fertilizer and then the protein for us.
She's truly the foundation of civilization
and the foster mother of the human race.
Without her, we just don't have society.
So out of all the domesticated animals,
they're all herd species,
and they look to you for leadership.
All of our domesticated animals are herd species
and look for you for leadership.
That is except the cat.
We haven't domesticated the cat.
You go to the refrigerator at home, you feed the dog,
it wags its tail, it looks at you and goes,
"You're a god, and you feed me"
You go to the refrigerator, feed a cat.
It looks at you with disgust and says,
"I'm a god, and they feed me."
We say dogs have masters and cats have staff.
(laughter)
So anyway, that's our cat.
So we have a covenant to care for and keep this,
this beast.
You, in this room, are the keepers of the covenant.
The one fun thing about animal welfare,
about dairy welfare, about cow comfort,
the great thing about it is the more you do it,
the better you do it, the more milk the cow gives.
So it's a win-win, and society has adapted this.
But you're the keeper of the covenant,
and she's the star of the show,
whether she's Holstein or Jersey, it doesn't matter.
She's the star, and she's the reason we came together.
This is your first homework assignment from me.
It's a book called Guns, Germs & Steel,
and it's the story of civilization.
And our domesticated animals, particularly our cow,
is the star of the book.
It's the star of civilization.
And if you can't get through the book,
there's a six-hour video by Jared Diamond
and National Geo, and the six-hour video is spectacular.
So either get the video or get the book,
and look about Guns, Germs & Steel
and see what our cow has done as a star.
The very first vaccine developed was developed
against small pox.
So it's killed more people than all of our wars combined.
And we took the juice,
the fluid off the blister of an end of a,
blister on the end of a cow's teat
and we vaccinated with it.
In fact, if you're my age, they took a glass rod,
they dipped it in cow pox
and then broke the skin of your shoulder.
And I still have a scar here, it's the mark of the cow.
And it's a scar that I was given, cow pox.
So it protected it.
The Latin word for cow, the French word for cow,
the Spanish word for cow is, the Latin word was vacca,
the same as the Spanish word today.
The French word is vache, but it's a root word for cow.
That's the root word for vaccinate.
We don't vaccinate, we cow-inate!
We don't give vaccine, we give cow-cine.
She has been with us since the beginning.
And I'm telling you what you already know,
but I need to start it out this way
as how we take care of cows.
So when I was a baby vet in Weyauwega,
I was pretty sure that what I was going to do was this:
on the right side of the line,
I was going to take care of reproduction.
There were 2.2 million dairy cows
in the state of Wisconsin then.
What's our dairy population right now?
I've got two extension agents.
- [Voiceover] A million and a quarter.
- A million and a quarter?
We were just over two million then.
We had about 80 thousand, 55 to 60 thousand herds
when I got here in the state.
Today, we're just under 10,000.
I've been able to run 40,000 people out of business,
so be careful with what I'm telling you.
But I was pretty sure that if I could get my hand up
the butt of all of those cows in this state,
I could save their life.
I wanted to be a veterinarian.
I really looked with envy at those California guys
who would have miles of cows lined up
and swing from tail to tail doing rectals.
Today, I call them tail monkeys.
But anyway, I was pretty sure that getting my hand up
the butt of a cow, I could save every cow in the state.
I was going to do this work.
I was going to take care of milk quality, mastitis,
take care of babies, sick cows,
maybe embryo transfer.
All of that was starting early in the '70s, early '80s.
And I was pretty sure I was on that side of the line.
If I could fix that side of the line, I could help men.
In fact, I remember in a Waupaca county barn, 20 cows,
I brought my two-year-old son.
He's sitting on a bale of hay.
Dad's checking a cow, dairyman's holding a tail,
and my son's eyes got as big as saucers.
And Brian looked at me and said,
you know, the dairyman goes,
"He's going to say something."
And I said, "Yeah, let's see what happens."
And he looked and goes, "I'm telling mom!"
(laughter)
He was pretty sure what I was doing just wasn't right.
Anyway, I looked at that and decided
if I could work on this side of the line,
if I could help here,
I could help dairymen.
When we went from 55,000 herds down to 10,000
where we're at today,
in Waupaca County and in Oconto County,
I started to watch the auctioneers.
The auctioneers would come in.
And as herds were selling out, they would do
three things in a dairy herd.
Number one, they would open the doors and cool it off,
because every dairyman seemed to have to have it
in short sleeve shirts in the winter.
It needed to be about 75 degrees in a dairy barn.
So they would cool it off,
they would clip and clean the cows.
And then the third thing they would do is bed them
belly-deep in straw for that week
while the neighbors came in to look at that 40-cow herd
to buy it out.
Every dairyman I had that had an auction
would look at that.
And in that last week, they would all tell me
the same thing.
This is the most milk these cows have ever given.
And I'd look at that guy and I'd say, "Well, what'd you learn?"
And they said, "I learned I can't afford that much straw."
(laughter)
Anyway, on this side of the line,
I remember in a little barn just down near Freedom,
I had a 60-cow herd that had more than three DAs that day.
And as a dairy vet, I was an excited young man.
I was going, "Yes!"
And Doug was going, "No!"
He said, "Gordie, your job is to stop these."
He said, "My worst day can't be your best day.
"So you're supposed to stop this."
So I stepped over the line and said,
"Okay, we're going to stop that."
This thin does this when I do this.
Think about this for a minute.
If I gave you a magic wand today
that got all your cows pregnant,
so I could give you this magic wand,
you hit it on each cow.
She's pregnant.
I sell the wand and I get paid today.
You get the money when?
Nine months I got to have a baby,
so I've got to get every cow pregnant.
It takes nine months, it'll take a year.
So I get the money today and you get it a year later.
And as you touch each cow with a magic wand,
what percentage of Wisconsin cows
go out this door every year?
About 35 to 40 percent of the herd goes out.
So when you do the magic on the cow,
about 40 percent of the magic goes out the door.
And some other heifer replaces it.
It takes a year.
If I fix mastitis, if I give you magic that stops mastitis,
I can't touch that anymore.
If I give you something that stops milk quality,
that stops mastitis, it stops 100 percent
of the new infections.
I sell it to you today,
when do you get the money?
So I sell it to your neighbor,
because most of you want to say
I start to get the money tomorrow.
Your neighbor has a 600,000 cell count.
I now gave him the tool that stops all new infections.
When does your neighbor start to get the money?
Every cow, if he has a 600,000 cell count average,
every cow has to go through a dry cow period
where we clean them up.
So it'll take a year for that magic to appear.
If I gave you magic that helped the babies not die,
grew stronger, when do we get the money
from the young stock?
Two and a half years.
I need 'em to start to have their own calf.
Two and a half years later.
So all of this has an immediate payback for me,
the veterinarian, and a longer pay-back for you.
If I move to nutrition and we fix the nutrition tomorrow,
the cows were short on kryptonite,
and we get enough kryptonite into the ration
that we've got what we need.
Superman can't come in the barn,
but we've got the kryptonite the cows need.
When do we get the milk when the ration fixed?
Next day.
And it has no culling effect.
It doesn't matter who leaves, the next cow eats that ration.
She doesn't need the next piece of magic.
When we fix the dry cows so that the fresh cows are good,
when we fix the dry cows so that the fresh cows are healthy,
no ketosis, no twisted stomachs, no DAs,
no metabolic problems, when do we get the money?
About six weeks, plus six weeks of milk.
So at about 12 weeks, three months, four months.
So if I can fix those two and if I fix the cow comfort,
if I become the auctioneer, cool it off,
make it yellower and cleaner and deeper,
I get the money immediately.
So I crossed the line.
Far off cows, dry cows, nutrition and cow comfort.
If I take care of those three things,
then everything on the right side of the line works better,
and the sick cows go away.
It's just that easy.
If we take better care of our cows,
that's all we're going to talk about today,
we'll use my dairy a little bit as an example.
I milk 3,500 cows now.
Four-row freestall barns.
I do have little brown cows.
Who in here has Jerseys?
You know why dairymen milk Jerseys, right?
We're too poor to milk Holsteins
and too proud to milk goats.
(laughter)
You don't like that.
I love my Jerseys, so I just love saying it.
These are my little, little girls, and they do well.
My little girls, depending on the season,
because I still have seasonal calving,
I still have an echo from eight years ago.
The echo is February, March and April, I calve like crazy.
Our guys are just going into it right now.
My dry cow barn is bulging out.
In eight years at my dairy, I haven't been able
to get rid of a one-year calving interval.
I'm plus or minus one year.
So I have a seven to eight-year echo.
And when I get to June and July, I'll have 74 pounds.
When I get lower days in milk like right now,
we'll have 65 pounds.
If we energy-correct that, it's still above 90 pounds
for those little Jerseys.
We have a rotary.
We calve 300 to 600 cows every month.
We have a six-row dry cow barn and a methane digester.
Sand bedding.
The summer?
The cell count is about 150.
In the winter, for my five years, it was at 125.
So this is the front of the dairy.
It looks like a Cabela's because that's where
I spent all my money.
(laughter)
And now that I have a Cabela's in Green Bay,
life is really good!
So it looks like a northern lodge.
This is how you eat up 80 acres of Juneau County.
This is how you take potato ground out of land.
That is 80 acres.
The long barns have the 3,500 milk cows.
This barn here has, the barn in the middle,
short barn just to the right of the parlor.
That barn has the far off dry cows.
This has the close-up dry cows.
This is maternity.
My maternity barn, where I calf 600 cows next month,
is no bigger than this room.
So we'll put them in with a double line here,
and they'll just calve out one side,
go to the other and head to the parlor.
We have six acres here of silage pad, the digester.
This would be bags of alfalfa,
and then this is the swimming pool.
It's 22 million gallon lagoon, concrete-lined.
And then you can see the flat land of the Central Sands.
So now that I'm a dairyman, what rules still apply?
Number one: cow comfort is first.
It's probably first, second and third.
Taking care of cows.
Number two: forage is king.
Better forage is better.
Number four: pregnancy rate means you keep your cows.
A high preg rate means I get to keep my cows.
The Dry Cow program stops early fresh cow losses,
and milk quality is everything.
If I keep a low cell count,
I have people fighting for my milk.
So it's nutrition, dry cows, cow comfort
that we talked about.
It's get them pregnant,
and people get everything done above.
At our dairy if a cow has a problem,
if she has mastitis, if she has twisted stomachs,
if she has a problem,
that problem has a first and last name.
And it's not e-E. E. E. E. E. coli.
It's not cryptosporidium.
It is Peter Jones didn't feed right.
It is Chava Gomez, he didn't do something right.
It's my mechanic didn't fix my vacuum to suck up manure.
My cows don't get a problem unless somebody fails them.
Cows don't get problems because they catch bugs.
I feel sorry for the bugs that catch my cows.
I brought together 19 states' worth of cows.
I'm probably the only vet in Wisconsin
that doesn't believe in the germ theory.
I brought together 19 states' worth of cows.
I co-mingled them in my dairy.
When you come to Central Sands and visit me,
you'll ask if you need to put boots on.
I say, "Yes, you do. You need to protect your herd."
I already have every bug in North America.
I invited them in.
There's salmonella, there's e-E. E. E. E. E. coli, everybody's there.
Johne's, they're all there.
None of them show up because of great ventilation,
because of good beds and good rations, dry and milk cows.
So cows don't get problems unless we fail them.
Okay, bottlenecks.
I want you to think about bottlenecks.
Bottlenecks are rate-limiting problems.
Think about water going through a pipeline
and the dents in the pipeline.
I want you to think about these little dents.
Veterinarians and dairymen, dairymen present problems
to veterinarians, and we feel like skeet shooters at times.
You throw it up; shoot the problem.
Find the rate-limiting problem.
Find the big dent.
Find the one in the middle here.
Find this dent.
This is the dent going from your inputs into profit.
Find this one.
No matter what you do to that little dent,
you're not going to get more profit.
For the baby calves, it'll take two to three years.
Work on things that get immediate returns
on immediate bottlenecks and then keep going.
So bottlenecks are rate-limiting problems.
They interfere with achieving your goals.
Any improvement pays off in better output.
Before it's completely fixed,
something else will become the bottleneck.
So here's how to improve the dairy:
Survey the status and performance trends of your dairy;
compare those to benchmarks of industry performance
or your personal goals;
identify the bottlenecks, open them up
and repeat the process.
Keep going after the bottlenecks.
And as you remove those bottlenecks,
the dairy herd will perform better.
And that's what we're going to talk about today.
This was a dairy I visited overseas.
It was in China.
These were 14 problems we identified on the dairy.
Lock-up time was too long.
There was not enough feed at lock-up in the morning.
The beds, we needed to adjust the neck rail forward.
We had a bar in front of the beds.
Cooperation of teams.
The milk hose was too long.
We have seven-foot high weeds outside,
blocking air coming into the dairy.
All of these.
We put them in an order, an order here
that we could fix them.
This is dollar signs,
and this is KGs, or pounds of milk.
So this is milk.
So it wasn't very much money to fix the lock-up time
and we'd get some more milk.
Very costly to fix the beds, but we'd get a lot more milk.
Here, if we delivered more feed in the morning,
lots of milk, little in-turn, little input.
So list the bottlenecks, identify the bottlenecks
and then go on.
Here's the other homework I've got for you.
Books on goal, on dairy management.
These are the two books I've asked all of the dairymen
I work closely with to read,
or to get the video notes, or whatever.
By Goldratt, The Goal.
This is the story of the limit of constraints.
This is the story of bottlenecks.
It's an easy novelette
on finding bottlenecks on a business.
Dairy farming run as a business
is a great, great way of life.
Dairy farming run as a way of life
is a very poor business.
And I worked with a whole lot of dairymen
who upped their game a lot in Oconto County
and became, from 25 to 300 cows,
became awesome business guys.
Chased down bottlenecks and kept moving forward,
and this book helped us a lot.
The second book is The E Myth by Gerber.
This is the story of Susie the pie maker.
Susie is a kick-butt pie maker.
She makes the best pie in the U.S.,
and her pie business was failing.
She needed to organize her business.
She needed to organize her dairy,
only her dairy was pie making.
Even though she was a great pie maker,
she wasn't making money as a pie business.
And so it's about the organization of business.
So these two books are fast and fun to read.
They're not really in-your-face business books.
They're both novelettes of stories,
but they have hidden meaning in there
that will really help organize a dairy,
both for the jobs we do and then for finding bottlenecks.
About 60 to 75 percent of the problems I find
are either in the fresh cows/dry cows,
cow comfort, the ration,
short of kryptonite; or, when the ration is delivered,
how it's delivered, how much is delivered,
what's the form of the ration?
And then, repro, milk quality and young stock.
So it goes like this:
there are only three things a cow should do.
She should stand to milk.
She should stand to eat and drink,
and then all the rest of the time,
she ought to be laying down, chewing her cud,
deciding if she'll vote for Trump or for Hillary.
She ought to be laying there in bed, just chewing her cud.
And we'll give you a little bit of science on that.
But if you think about this, when I walk a dairy,
I go, "Okay. How much," we'll talk about this.
Let's go, going forward.
So this is a picture from Minnesota somebody sent me.
Said, "Gordie, it's a perfect picture.
"They're either standing, eating, drinking or in bed."
So what do you see?
To me it's almost perfect
if these cows could also get in bed.
I've got to believe that right down here was empty of stalls
and they all could go to bed down there.
Otherwise, it may not be so perfect.
It may be a little overcrowded.
So we're going to talk about concentric consistency.
When I was on the 25-cow dairies of Waupaca County,
it was pretty easy.
Those are the fresh cows; there's the tail-enders;
the two pens in the corner were the calving pens,
and the baby calves were tied along the wall
and that was the dairy.
Pretty easy to understand.
As I started to get on multi-thousand cow dairies,
dairies got harder to understand for me.
And so I needed a trick.
I needed a mental game to play,
and it's a game that helps you follow,
it's a game that helps you follow and find bottlenecks.
So that game is three circles, concentric consistency.
The first circle is what does 24 hours in the life
of your cow look like, whether that's your dry cow,
your close-up, your milk cow, your fresh cows,
your tail-enders?
What does 24 hours in her life look like?
So how does she spend a day?
How many times does she milk?
Two? three?
Are you milking the fresh pen six or eight times?
What does a day look like in the life of a cow?
How much time does she spend in the parlor?
As we open the gate and go to the parlor,
the clock starts here.
The clock starts when the gate is open.
And now the clock starts, she goes to the holding area;
she goes through the parlor.
Some of you have palpation rails and other places
where you bother them on the exit coming back
and until the gate closes.
I want a cow to spend 20-plus hours a day
eating, drinking or sleeping in this pen.
So she should not be out of the pen more than four hours.
No more than four hours away from feed, water and bed.
If you extend past that four hours,
you've taken time away from either eating or bed
and both of those make us money.
So when is feed delivered?
I'm going to take you back to the edge of the Ice,
back to the Ice Age, back to the edge of a glacier.
I'm going to make you a wild cow.
You're Pleistocene megafauna.
You have to remember what cows are.
Cows are slow-moving prey species.
Somebody eats cows for a living.
So now you're going to explain
to your baby cow what we do.
I told this to a group of Italian dairymen,
I said, "You won't understand this word."
Every other joke I said didn't work,
and when I told them, "You wouldn't understand this word."
I said, "Cows are corpuscular."
The Italian 600-cow dairymen laughed
like I had just told them the biggest joke I had.
In Italian, crepuscolare is evening.
It is dusk, it is low light.
It is when we start to drink wine.
And so they knew what they are.
Cows are corpuscular.
That means they're dawn-dusk creatures.
At the low light of the morning
and the low light of the evening,
they want to go out and eat fast.
So now you're a wild cow and you're going to explain
to your baby what we do.
We go out at dawn, junior.
It's time to wean, junior.
We go out at dawn.
We eat as much as we can, as fast as we can.
(mimics gobbling)
Just eat, and then we boogie back to safety.
We lay down in relative safety after that,
and we barf it back up and chew it again.
And junior looks at you and goes, "Whoa! Time out, mom!
"Can't we just eat a little slower?"
And you say, "You remember my sister, your Aunt Harriett?
"She's not with us anymore.
"She was a slow eater."
So cows want to eat fast.
They want to eat rapidly, and they want to do it
in the morning.
What does that mean to you, a dairymen?
It doesn't matter if you have a tie-stall barn
and you go around the barn without a TMR.
It doesn't matter if you have a TMR.
I need you to deliver more
than 50 percent of the average dry matter intake
at exit from parlor in the morning.
This is the single biggest thing I'll tell you today.
We're in a business together, your dairy and my dairy,
where we make the last bite and we turn that into milk.
What's milk worth right now?
Whose got a price, today's milk?
18 cents?
Are we getting, is anybody getting 20 cents?
Twenty is easier math.
So we're getting 16 cents,
16 to 18 cents for a pound.
A pound of dry matter will make how much?
The last pound of dry matter,
the last bite will make how much milk?
The first bite she takes in the morning
just makes another cow.
If you have a Holstein, it's 15 percent tax.
If you have a Jersey, it's an eight to 10 percent tax.
If you have a Brown Swiss, she's even bigger,
so it might be a 16 percent tax.
The first bite is tax, maintenance.
The last bite is the most profitable bite.
The last bite right now is costing between
eight and 10 cents, the last pound.
It'll make two and a half pounds of milk.
Two and half at 16, 16 and eight.
16, 16, 32 and eight is 40 cents.
Eight cents, I'll give you eight cents, you give me 40.
Even at $16 milk, it is a great, great business,
the last bite.
So the job is, how do we get more last bites?
I was with a group of dairymen in Pennsylvania, all Amish,
all stanchion barns.
I talked to them about corpuscular,
about dawn and about getting more food
around the stanchion barn to cows in the morning
before you milk, while you're milking and before.
Don't string it out.
The more food you can get her to eat earlier,
the more last bites you get.
So I need to deliver more than 50 percent
of the average dry matter intake at exit
from parlor in the morning.
On all of our dairies at Fair Oaks,
even down in hot Indiana, we delivery 105 percent
at morning exit from parlor.
One other quick tip for you in the summer,
those of us who knock down feed from a silage pile,
who's the first group we milk in the morning?
Fresh cows.
We usually milk a fresh pen first.
So last night, yesterday, when you knock down feed,
you can't knock down 100 percent of your needs.
You have to knock down 101, 102, 105 percent
because, by definition, you have to knock down
everything you need.
So unless you have a defacer, just feeding the mixer,
you're going to knock down a few extra percentages
of corn silage.
That's going to sit there all night long,
oxygenate and heat.
And now you're going to mix that into your first batch
that goes to who in the morning?
Your best cows.
Let's not do that.
Let's either get up an hour earlier as the feeder
and feed that to the last pen, the low cows,
or push it to the side, get new stuff off the face,
feed it to the fresh cows and then keep going.
But I need, I deliver 105 percent summer and winter,
and right now it's winter.
So there's no excuse for not putting more than 60
to 100 percent of the food the cow's going to eat
at exit from parlor in the morning.
Okay, how long is she locked up?
That should be, while she's eating,
she should be locked up no more than an hour.
It'll take her 18 to 26 minutes to eat her major meal
in the morning.
So the first half hour of being locked up,
she's still eating while you're doing work.
And I was pretty convinced
when I started helping, in Oconto County,
started to build the 100-cow freestalls,
I would look at the headlocks.
I talked them into headlocks because I thought headlocks
saved us labor.
I was convinced, even when I left Oconto County
just in the end of 1998,
that a headlock was great for the dairyman
and just average for the cow.
I took Monsanto's money and I paid Kansas State
to prove that headlocks were costing us.
I wanted to know how much they were costing us in intake.
And Mike Brook, John Smith and Joe Harner at K-State
did the trial with a hundred cow herd with a neck rail.
These cows were all headlock fed.
They took the headlocks out for two weeks
and put a neck rail in.
Then they put the headlocks back in for two weeks.
Then the headlocks were out, and then back in.
So it was an eight-week period, and milk was identical.
There was no milk loss.
I was stunned.
I was happy to use Monsanto's money to find out.
But because at my dairies, every place
where the man pass was, the pass-over, the crossover
where the people pass was,
the cows were eating more food there.
I could see them even eat it all.
So I said the headlocks were costing us.
It turns out the headlocks didn't cost us money.
In fact, the headlocks saved us a quarter pound
to a half pound of dry matter intake
to get the same amount of milk.
At a neck rail, where cows are eating,
they're throwing more feed over their back.
They're biting it and bringing it back.
And that neck rail, as good as it was,
was using a little bit more feed not being eaten,
but a little bit more feed being used to get the same milk.
So anyway, lock up.
I need her locked up on exit from parlor.
She can be locked up for no more than an hour.
For those of us doing work on exit from parlor
in palpation rails and those kind of spots,
either have food available there,
or get them back to the freestalls.
Okay, so what does a day look like?
She comes up to the parlor.
At our parlor, our greeter says hi to her,
says welcome to Central Sands,
I hope you're having a great day while you're here.
Housekeeping is making the beds.
Housekeeping is vacuuming the floors.
The chef has whipped up something nice for you
called a TMR.
A little bit of corn silage, a little bit of hay,
a little bit of haylage.
And we're hoping you're having a great day.
So while she's in the parlor,
housekeeping is making the beds, vacuuming the floors,
and the chef has whipped up something,
and we deliver 105 percent at exit from parlor.
And then we start pushing it up immediately.
One of the take-homes I have for you before noon,
so tomorrow, walk through your neighbor's barn.
You don't have to go through yours,
because yours is perfect.
But in your neighbor's barn, before noon,
I never want to see one of your milk cows hit concrete.
I don't want to see that dished out spot
where she's eaten all that she can eat.
So now she's playing with food.
And if she's a Jersey, she is particularly good
at sorting food.
She can lay the corn here, the soybean here.
She can lay out every ingredient with her tongue.
But before noon, I don't want to see any concrete.
So that means we start pushing up almost immediately.
If I go back to this slide, when 105 percent is delivered,
my push-up starts then so that my best cows,
if you're averaging 85, let's average 90 pounds.
We have herds in here that can do 100.
Herds in Oconto County are doing 100.
If you're averaging 80 pounds,
well, let's take 90.
If you're averaging 90,
your average intake is about 58 pounds,
56 to 58 pounds of dry matter.
You're best cow
on a 90-pound herd average, your best cow
is doing 108 pounds, pushing 200.
If you're at 100, your best cow is 200.
If you're at 80 pounds or 75, your best cow is 160, 170.
So you have cows that can do 170 pounds
in an 80-pound herd.
Those are the cows I don't want to see have concrete.
Half of the herd is above 80
when you're at an 80-pound average.
By definition half is above 80.
And half of them are above-average dry matter intakes.
And it's those cows in the 18 to 26 minutes
that we most miss getting further milk from, further intake.
So keep it there, keep it delivered,
and then get her to bed.
Get her to bed to let her chew her cud,
lay in bed and do that.
Next, go to the maternity pen.
This is my maternity pen.
I've calved 600.
Next month, February, we'll calve 600 cows in that pen.
Go to the pen, look who's there and ask yourself,
"How does that cow or how does that heifer
"get back to this pen again?"
What does a year look like?
How does she travel around the barn for a year?
You now know what a day looks like
in your life of your cow.
What does a year look like?
How many group changes does she go through?
How many times does she have to re-introduce herself?
"I'm Gordie."
- [Voiceover] Tom. - Tom.
Tom just lost six pounds and he'll lose it for three days.
I'll lose it for three days. (laughter) - [Voiceover] Thank you.
- Thank you.
Six pounds of milk. - [Voiceover] Aww.
- Aww.
Every time a cow has to introduce herself to a new cow
in a small group of cows,
she will now stop eating her last bite.
That last bite gets me two and a half.
She'll stop eating two or three last bites.
She'll lose about four to six pounds.
The UBC, University of British Columbia data
shows that pretty strong.
Group changes.
When cows are in groups of under 100,
this room is under 100,
when cows are in groups of under 100,
the cows know everybody in the group.
They know all the names of each other.
Cows can only remember about 80 to 100 names.
So in a subset of 100 cows in a pen,
all those cows know each other.
So when a cows moves into the new pen
and says "Hey Tom!"
Tom doesn't eat for a few minutes.
Tom's trying to decide if he's going to the boss cow
or I'm going to be the boss cow.
And while we're making that decision,
I've already decided he can kick my butt.
And it's all on power if you're a cow.
It's all on size and determination.
If you can, if you're a little more determined,
you can prove, you can bluff your way
that you're more powerful.
But it's built on power.
And when they make these decisions,
trying to see who's higher or lower in the hierarchy,
it loses two to three pounds of dry matter intake.
You lose six pounds of milk
until I've decided Tom's a winner.
And now every time I see Tom, I go
"Go to the bunk, please."
So when groups are in under a hundred,
there is one subset, one group socially group of cows.
When cows are in groups of bigger than a hundred
and less than two hundred,
they have two subsets of groups of cows.
They have the Bloods and the Crips,
because they can't remember 120, 140 and 160 cow names.
Right now, in Oconto and in Waupaca County,
Shawano County, one of the things we're getting
the most of is these subsets of 120, 140 cow groups.
So when we have 100 cow groups,
how many different waterers do we need?
I need two spots.
Because if we voted Tom the top cow,
I need Tom not guarding both waterers.
If there's only one waterer, Tom can guard the one waterer.
If there's two, we're going to drive Tom nuts
going back-and-forth.
So I need two watering spots.
I need two inches of water, four inches of water per cow.
It depends on which expert, which book we pick up.
But I always say, if a cow can drink here,
think of her as 10 cows.
If one cow fits here, that's ten cows.
So where you have two cows, you have 20.
Where you can fit three, it's 30.
And now find that for your pen.
That's pretty easy math.
One cow spot is 10 cows.
Now I need two spots.
Here's one of the big mistakes we're making
in the medium-sized dairies we're building today,
is the 120-160 cow pens now have three waterers.
We have one cross-over in the middle.
We have one cross-over.
We have a water at each end and a waterer in the middle.
We have two social groups.
The Bloods over here have taken two waterers.
Tom's busy guarding.
In the other group, the Crips, there's only one waterer.
That social group is now guarding one,
and in that group of cows, they now can limit
the easiest, cheapest intake.
So when we build the 100-plus pen group size,
I want that cross-over in the middle
if we're only going to put one.
I want it bigger, a little wider than the books ask for,
and I want two waterers.
If you're under a hundred cows, it doesn't matter.
We'll end up with the right number of waterers.
But it's that odd-size.
When the pen size gets above 250,
and has anybody in here got pen sizes greater than 250?
So the only thing I'm going to tell you in that size,
once we're over 250, there is no social order anymore.
Cows can't remember enough names.
They keep running into another cow and go, "What was, what was..."
And they give up.
You know, 200 to 400 cow pen,
they just end up having no social order.
They end up having friends.
They'll have three to four to six buddies
that look like them.
Same color usually, Jerseys will,
the five Jerseys you got hang together.
(audience member mumbles)
Yeah, and in their pen, they'll be together.
And they'll end up having cows that look like them,
and they'll have no social order.
So as pen sizes get bigger, there's no social order.
But it's the awkward, 120, 140, 160 cow pens
I need another waterer.
If you can't fix it this winter,
we can add one to the outside in the summer
for at least eight, ten, months of the year,
nine months of the year.
We add a waterer at the edge of the pen
and we'll take care of that.
Okay, how many rations?
How many times do you deliver different rations?
So when you move a cow from the high pen
to the low pen, there are people,
your neighbor's feed a low ration.
When you move the cow to the low ration,
who wants her not to drop in milk?
So I move a cow to the low ration,
who says I don't want her to drop?
Why do we feed a low ration?
Save money
and to prevent her from getting fat.
Those are the two reasons dairymen will tell me.
We'll feed a low ration to save money.
And so what do we leave out of the low ration?
- [Voiceover] Protein?
- Protein usually, that's the most expensive part
of the ingredient.
So when we move her to the low ration,
I want her to drop.
So when I move my cow to the low ration, I want her to drop.
Because if she doesn't drop in milk, I made a huge mistake.
I should've been feeding the low ration to the high cows
if they don't drop.
The low ration's cheaper.
So when they move to the cheaper, low-protein ration,
they should drop in milk.
I just want her to not drop as much as
more than the money I'm saving.
If she loses more milk than the money I'm saving,
I'm losing money.
In fact it turns out that there's no dairy herd
in Wisconsin that should ever feed a low ration.
So I've got 4,000 cows, 3,500 milk cows,
and I feed one milk cow ration.
I don't feed a low ration to my cows.
Obama, I heard, banned low rations.
He said you can only feed high and medium
because low was hurting their self-esteem.
So they could only be in high and medium rations.
But we shouldn't feed medium.
One ration.
Now the danger with a high ration is that
she's going to get fat.
She's not going to get fat for two reasons.
Number one, she's going to make more milk
on the high ration.
That's energy out of her body.
And the other reason is there's extra protein
in that high ration.
So the extra protein takes energy to excrete.
That energy to excrete is the Atkin's diet.
All protein and you lose weight.
So they don't get fatter and you make more money,
single ration.
Okay, when do you breed cows?
How many pen moves?
That goes with group changes.
How long is she dry?
We're not going to do dry cows today
but I need 60 days dry.
I don't need short dry cow periods.
I need at least 45 days to rebuild an udder
to do the 100 pounds next year.
And to do that,
to make sure everybody gets 45,
I've got to be at 55 to 60 days
that have the biological spread so that nobody
has under 45 days.
So how does she travel around the dairy?
Now go to the maternity pen
and look at junior.
Go to the maternity pen, don't look at mom anymore.
Go, how does she travel around the dairy?
What does two years look like?
So maternity pen, when do you give colostrum?
We didn't come here to do a calf thing.
How much time does she spend in the hutch?
The only thing I'm going to give you here is
when you wean them,
when you bring them out of weaning,
we've taken a social group.
We've taken a corpuscular animal.
The other thing that cows are,
is they're Alderman-centric.
Alderman-centric means we do things together.
We eat together, we sleep together.
We do things together.
We're a herd animal.
We're not fast enough to outrun the predators.
Because of that, we do everything together.
So now you've taken baby away from mom.
You've put them in a little white hutch.
You've kept them clean, dry and comfortable
and you've kept them alone in that hutch.
Go back, and we've taken
a herd animal and for six, eight weeks,
we've made it a lone animal.
We made little autistic children.
Their brains are a little bit fried.
They're not used to being part of a group.
When you wean them, I want that weaning group
to be under 20,
20 or less.
And it needs to be in even numbers.
It needs to be in even numbers for the first seven days.
Years ago, in Oconto County, we were telling those guys,
wean them in even numbers.
Today, last year, there was finally research from UBC
that says calves weaned in even numbers make more milk,
more growth, less set-backs
than calves coming out in odd numbers.
All right, rations, group changes,
what does two years look like?
So how do calves travel around the dairy?
What does it look like?
One day, one year, two years.
These are the three circles for trouble-shooting your dairy.
These are the three circles that it's easy to figure out
how I find bottlenecks.
One other thing.
The value of standard operating procedures,
that's that book from our lady,
Susie the Pie maker from Gerber,
the entrepreneurial myth, The E Myth.
That book talks about job descriptions.
It talks about value of standard operating procedures.
I'm fortunate enough now to get to Australia,
to get to China, to get to South America,
to get around the world.
I had my wife, last summer,
I was going on French dairies,
And I got to go on French dairies.
I took my wife finally at the end of that trip,
I got her to Paris and I promised her
I'd take her to a world-famous restaurant in Paris.
And I took her to McDonald's.
And my wife was so mad, she couldn't see straight.
I don't care what country, whether I'm in Beijing,
Buenos Aires, Berlin, Prague, I go to the McDonald's.
I want to see one thing in a McDonald's.
I want to see the magic.
I want to see who's in McDonald's.
McDonald's around the world does magic.
They do the same thing around the world.
It's clean, it's well lit, it's bright,
and the French fries are hot.
And they do it with three employees.
They do it with the very young, the very old
and I'm going to be politically correct
because this is on tape, the uneducated.
They often do it with the very dumb.
So they do it with the uneducated, the work-entry force.
They're able to achieve excellence around the world,
it doesn't matter what country,
with that workforce.
Our jobs on dairying are lots of little, simple jobs.
It's the timing of those jobs.
It's the timing of the delivery of feed,
the timing of the cow out of the parlor.
It's the timing of all of those jobs
that makes cows perform well,
but they're really pretty simple jobs stacked up.
But if you can be the
conductor that conducts the timing
that makes the magic, that is the music that is a dairy,
you could run General Motors.
Obama ran General Motors.
So you could run General Motors.
The dairy people in my dairy
are certified in their position.
Every person knows and understands their job.
People who milk for me, people who do maternity,
people who vacuum manure, people who run the digester,
they know and understand their job.
In fact, every person at our dairy that's certified
has passed an exam, written or oral, about their job.
If you're a milker,
you understand that oxytocin works for six to eight minutes.
You understand,
(thud)
if I make a loud noise, we make adrenalin.
If we make adrenalin, we block oxytocin
for eight to 10 minutes.
So that means a ride on the rotary at Central Sands
with a guy screaming, hitting, herding a cow,
that ride was in futile.
You understand how to take apart a milker.
You passed it, you get a $25 a day bonus
for passing your exam.
If you're a herdsman, you have to pass a written exam.
You have to know about milk withholding,
you have to know about drugs.
You have to know about diagnosing.
It's probably the hardest thing I've ever done
in a dairy was to make job descriptions,
to describe what the job was.
It's the most rewarding thing I've ever done on a dairy.
My first year at Central Sands was making them
understand their jobs.
Once they understood their jobs,
people are happy in their jobs
because then they know what they want.
So the people who work for me understand what they want,
what we want.
That means when I go by, they're not wondering,
is the boss mad at me?
I'm doing what I'm supposed to.
If I'm doing what I'm supposed to, he's not going to be mad.
And if they're not doing what they're supposed to,
they know they're not.
And so now, discipline's easy.
People understand it.
Making that job description, writing it down
and getting it in Spanish if you're dealing with Mexicans,
getting it in English for our other people,
getting it done.
It's just that easy.
It's probably the most important thing I've done
on the dairy for getting performance from people.
Then you're the conductor of a symphony
because it's just timing little jobs.
Okay, when you walk the dairy, walk your facilities,
I think about A, B and C.
I've thought about these since the beginning here
in Waupaca County.
I think about A, air quality.
I need 40 degree air for cows.
I need colder air.
The colder the air, the fresher the air,
the more the intake.
Jeff Horsens' barn was one of those
80-cow stanchion barns I had in Shawano County.
Jeff put in two big fans and we made a wind tunnel
out of a stanchion barn.
Every wind tunnel in every stanchion barn I ever did,
all through those days, got us 2,000 pounds more milk
in a year, not by heat stress.
Fresh air moving over cows barely helps us
with heat stress,
but by making air fresher so cows eat one more bite.
Day in and day out, if the air is fresher,
she'll eat more food.
It's just that easy.
And then B is bunk.
It's the ration you formulate, the ration you mix
and the ration the cow consumes.
I need that, I need it to have a great bunk design.
I need it to have great forage, high feed quality,
but I look for how do I get a cow to eat one more bite?
And then the last one is cow comfort,
both what do we do for heat stress in the holding area
and in the freestalls, in your tie-stall barns;
and how do we get her to lay down?
How do I get that cow to lay down for one extra hour?
You're going to get two pieces of science from me today.
This is Alex Bach's work.
Alex is a veterinarian from Spain who got his Ph.D.
in Nutrition at Minnesota.
Alex spent a summer, he spent 60 days
in Oconto County with me back in the '90s.
Alex took 47 herds in Spain with similar genetics,
and they all made their forage at one place.
They all fed the same TMR for the experiment.
It was the same TMR.
It could be delivered in the morning, at night,
it didn't matter.
You could get the TMR at any time.
Those 47 herds varied by more than 28 pounds,
29 pounds per cow per day.
A low of 45 average and a high of 74.
Small, little Spanish herds.
Non-dietary factors account for 56 percent of the variation
in milk yield.
Non-dietary factors for 56 percent.
It's not the percentage of kryptonite or methionine
or lysine in your rations.
I can fix that.
It's, "How do I get her to eat another bite?"
How do I get her to eat another bite and go to bed?
Those are my two things.
How does she get the food and how does she get to bed?
So feeding management, feeding for refusals.
I get four more pounds if I feed five extra
pounds of milk, five extra pounds, five percent.
So five percent on 50 is two and half pounds
of dry matter.
Two and half times 10 cents is 25 cents.
Four pounds times 16 cents, I'll do it four times.
Four times sixteen, four times fifteen is 60.
I'm making double my money throwing away five percent.
Now I'm not so stupid as to throw five percent away.
I really owned a dairy farm.
I still own part of a dairy farm.
I feed it to another group.
But by having it in front of the cows,
I get the opportunity for four more pounds of milk.
If I push up early,
I can go from 55 pounds to 63 and a half.
I can get nine more pounds just having feed
available in the morning.
Having feed available, push up earlier,
having the cow eat more.
Stall design, go to bed, stalls per cow, age at calving,
all of that meant the difference of 30 pounds of milk
between the highest and lowest.
This was done at the Miner Institute
and also done by Alex Bach.
It's milk on the vertical axis
and resting time.
It says that if I can go to bed
for one extra hour, I get 3.7,
almost four pounds more milk.
If I can get to bed for one extra hour
above seven, above 10, 13 to 17,
if I can hit that sweet spot of 13 to 14 to 15 hours in bed,
I can get an extra 3-6 pounds more milk by going to bed.
There's a 32 percent correlation in this number.
Where's that data?
31 percent.
The R squared value is 31 percent.
That means the relationship between the vertical line
and the horizontal, the horizontal and vertical,
is a 31-percent relationship.
If you don't feed them anymore and they go to bed,
it doesn't matter.
You just get a well-rested cow.
You've got to get one more bite.
What does one more bite look like to a cow?
We're just over Thanksgiving.
Think about Thanksgiving.
You came in for that meal.
There were six helpings of everything.
More food than is humanly possible in one spot,
it seems like, and you ate everything that you could,
and you had two and a half helpings of everything.
And then Mom said, "Pie?"
And you went, "No, no."
Mom said, "pie!"
And you went, "Yeah, apple and pumpkin."
And you ate that pie.
That is what a last bite looks like.
I want that every day, and I want it earlier in the day.
So lots of food delivered so she goes to bed.
Freestalls.
They fail for four reasons.
They fail for lack of cushion.
Go to your neighbors
and see how soft his freestalls are.
Have your neighbor jump in the air and land on his knees
where the cows do.
And if he can get up again, they're soft enough.
If he can't get up again, you get to tell him
it's too hard for the cows and I'll get the ambulance here.
We've fractured both your kneecaps.
So lack of cushion.
If I make 'em softer, they spend more time in the bed.
Neck rail placement.
If I put the neck rail so a cow can get into bed,
that means she's got to get all four feet in bed.
If I come into your dairy, your neighbor's dairy today,
and we see the cows standing with their front feet in
and their back feet out,
if I see more than 20 percent of the cows
in that position, it's called perching,
more than 20 percent of the cows perching in the winter
mean your neck rail's too far back.
I don't know the size of your cows.
I don't know if they're Jersey,
I don't know if they're small Holsteins.
I don't know if they're giant Holsteins.
That neck rail needs to be far enough forward
that in the winter, when a cow stands in bed,
she stands straight and has all four feet in bed.
That's where the right place is.
They'll be a few cows that poop in the bed
because you'd be a little bit far forward
for the little ones, but that neck rail placement
will keep cows out of bed and then they spend
less hours in bed, and you don't get 3.7 pounds more milk.
Lunge space.
I need to lunge and bob.
We'll show a slide of that.
And then lack of, I call it lack of fresh air and vision.
What is really is, is you're taking a prey species,
a slow-moving prey species who can see 320 degrees
and only has to move her head slightly to see 360.
You've taken a prey species,
and some of us have asked her to go to bed
and to put her face like this and say,
"This is where I'm going to go to bed."
No prey species feels comfortable here.
She wants to do this.
And when she does that, look at my back end.
My back end turns this way or this way,
and now it goes to the corner of the stall
and dirties the stall.
We'll talk about that more.
Okay.
So when a cow gets up, you've all seen this.
She has to lunge forward to this point from laying here,
and she has to bob to this point.
Lunge, bob.
If I restrict that, I restrict hours in bed.
I used to say that in the '80s, in the '90s, it was easy.
I just said, "Cow comfort was necessary."
Now we know it's 3.7 pounds more milk
for an extra hour in bed with a full stomach.
So if I can fix this space, this lunge and bob space,
she gets up easier.
If I have it wide open, these are the three positions
a cow takes when she lays down:
regular; long,
one or two legs out like Superman;
and then short, this cow in a ball down here.
So I've got short, regular and long.
Your freestalls and the other position,
the fourth position she'll take is all four feet
laying flat on her side.
That's called the dead cow position.
She'll do that outside,
but she can't do it in your freestalls.
But I need her to take these three positions.
Wide open in the front so she can lunge and bob.
A little bit of a brisket board here,
a brisket locator keeping her back
but letting her put her legs out forward.
I want her to lay square in bed.
So some of us are using organic material to bed cows:
straw, rice, manure,
dried solids, digested solids.
Some of us are using sand.
If we keep this cow square in bed,
every one of their tails is square,
then her manure stays out of the bed.
If she turns sideways in that bed, she dirties the bed.
It's not as bad a problem if we use sand for bedding.
If we use organic material:
straw, sawdust or manure, dried solids
or digested solids, if we use this spot here,
if she turns her head to the side,
these loops I've got now,
I'm using a loop that looks a little less cow friendly.
It's a loop that lays cows square.
It's a loop that makes her backbone
look parallel to the bed.
So now we've got a dog bone.
She can put her head under the dog bone.
Look at this black cow.
She's put her head under the dog bone,
and right here, her tail is now under the divider.
So she dirties that material.
If that material is sand, I don't have any trouble.
If you're using digested solids, I have no trouble
for cow comfort with digested solids.
The problem is when you contaminate it with fresh manure,
you're repopulating the bugs and then you get in trouble.
In our climate, the climate of Wisconsin,
10 people who bed with dried solids,
about two of them are able to be under 200,000 cell count.
And about six to eight are above 200, 300, 400.
And honestly, in my experience across the state,
if I can square those cows up,
stop contaminating the solids,
I can get under 200,000 in solids bed.
But it's all with a loop divider.
So I need a loop divider that keeps her square in bed.
This is a Hungarian dairy.
It was brand new.
They wanted the narrow loops.
They wanted 30-inch loops.
The Irish company sold them 40-inch loops, said,
"You don't want 30, nobody's putting those in anymore."
And so they put 40s in.
This is a 1,200-cow dairy who has 48 to 52 cows
in the hospital.
He knew what he wanted, he'd been to Fair Oaks,
he'd been to Central Sands.
I'd been to their dairy.
They're still fighting the Irish company,
but the herdsman said,
"Gordie, I can fix this with a two by four."
Look at this two by four.
Just in front of the neck rail.
He put a two by four from the high post to the low post.
And when he squared these cows up,
I've got one more picture of it,
when he squared these cows up,
he went from 48 to 50 cows in the hospital
down to 12 cows in the hospital.
He's no longer contaminating the beds with manure.
The cows are laying the same amount of time.
They're laying square.
They're wide open.
If I go backwards, wide open to the front.
All we did was take away,
we just took away putting their head to the side.
When they put their head to the side,
their butt goes sideways.
So they lay square.
They can lay in a circle.
If I go back to these cows,
they can lay in a circle.
They can lay.
They can put their head any way they want.
They just can't go over the loop divider.
They lay square in bed.
If they lay square in bed,
they keep from contaminating the bed.
All right.
So I want a 48-inch wide stall, a 48-inch high neck rail,
68 inches to the brisket board.
It looks like this.
I want this old loop to only be 28 to 30 inches high.
I still get great milk.
Jeff Horsens' right now is pulling 105, 104 pounds a cow.
That's his lowest milk in a year,
and half to 60 percent of his cows are in a barn
we built in 1996.
It'll be twenty years in two more months.
We've got it right for the last twenty years.
I don't care if it's 46 or 48 or 52 inches wide.
If I keep them laying square, they lay more, longer,
and softer and cleaner.
I want that board.
That board I'm talking about now on bigger loops
just goes in front of the neck rail.
It's a retrofit.
We just did it in Ontario, and the guy squared up his herd
and his cell count is starting to drop
and his hospital population went down.
So wide stalls.
We're making them wider.
Look at this, though.
This is a little tiny Jersey in a 46-inch wide stall.
I can almost put another Jersey in with her.
But, I've given her wide open lunge to the front.
She can lay in any position she wants,
she just can't lay diagonally.
So even though she's a tiny Jersey,
her backbone is parallel to the loop.
She's laying square in bed, and now she fits there.
It doesn't matter what size.
Maybe she goes too far forward because of the neck rail,
but she still lays square in bed.
All right.
The brisket board is 68 inches.
It needs to be two inches above the back.
If you're going to have loose bedding,
I need that bedding always to be kept even with the curve.
Otherwise, the brisket board gets higher,
the cows now measure from the brisket board
to inside the curve, and they don't use it.
Here's a dairy built in Russia.
This is a three and a half-year-old dairy,
now it's probably four.
It was built by one of the milking machine companies.
They've got rubber mats.
It's 1,200 cows, and they've got more than 380 cows
in the hospital.
And the guy asks me why?
And I said because you're a good dairyman.
I said, "I'm surprised you don't have 600 cows
"in the hospital."
And when they get against a wall,
you need to have that thing far enough away
that she doesn't feel threatened.
All of these cows are turning to the side,
partially because of the wall and partially because
they're prey species.
They're leaning against the wall
worried that they're going to hit the wall,
worried that something's going to get them so they all turn.
That puts their butts up higher, gets them dirty,
and it just looks like that.
Three things a cow should do:
stand to milk; stand to eat;
and all the rest of the time she should be in bed,
laying down, chewing her cud,
trying to solve the world's problems.
Milk is the absence of stress.
What's the highest producing cow in the world right now?
So we're at 100 pounds.
100 times 365 days
is 336,000 pounds of milk.
That's a herd average.
So our 100-pound herds are breaking.
I think there are 100, I heard last week
or a couple weeks ago, there are just over 110, 111 herds
in DHIA in the state over 30,000 pounds.
There's one herd in the state
over 40,000 right now, I think.
Two?
Okay, so two over 40,000.
When I met Jack Albright in 1983,
we were hitting 14,000, was the herd average in the state.
Jack introduced me to the 12 best cows in the nation.
They were the 12 cows over 32,000 pounds of milk.
Jack promised me there would be herd averages
above 35,000.
Jack's right.
What's our highest producing cow in the world right now?
She lives in this state.
She's up by Waldo.
She gave 72,444 pounds of milk in 365 days.
So 72,000 divided by 365 is 200 pounds a day.
That was her average production.
Her peak is over 500 pounds.
Here's what I promise every young person in this room.
There will be herds in the next twenty years
of 70,000 pound herds.
And they will be in barns that look something like this.
Milk is the absence of stress.
If we remove stress from our cows,
we let them express their genetic potential.
I was in Vermont giving a talk with a genomicist
from Texas A&M.
She's now in Vermont.
She says we're all done finding.
We got the genome all labeled.
We know where the milk is in the genes.
We're done.
She said, "Our job now is to just put 'em into one cow."
She said, "We found 88 to 92 percent,
"and the others are such small percentiles."
She goes, "We'll never get 'em into one cow."
But all of the rest, we've got the genome
that can make 70,000 day in and day out.
We just have to make facilities and rations,
single TMRs that make it happen.
So milk is the absence of stress.
When that auctioneer removed the stress,
those cows went up in milk.
When you remove the stress from our cow,
she goes up in milk.
If you get it right, it looks like this.
This is a 400-cow pen at Fair Oaks Dairies.
I got one or two cows standing.
So that's 400 cows in a pen, and they're all in bed.
These are my Jerseys at Central Sands.
These are my crossbreds.
If we get it right, it looks like that.
If we get it wrong, we can spend 13 million
on a brand new facility, and it looks like this.
Brand new facility, sand beds.
Neck rail in the wrong position,
brisket board in the wrong position.
Brisket board too high, neck rail too short
and the cows are laying in the alley.
Every month I get two loads of heifers.
I get 50 heifers that have gone down to Texas
for boarding school.
They've all gotten pregnant.
They've come back to me.
50 get off my bus.
They've gone 22 hours.
In Europe I would be locked up, put in jail,
for riding 22 hours on the bus
to come back to me, the truck.
They would make me stop two different times,
unload 'em, feed 'em, water 'em.
Twenty-two hours without food and water.
What's the first thing a cow wants
when she gets off that bus at my place?
I get lie down, I get eat, I get drink.
I've watched 'em for five years.
Every month I get two loads.
I get 100 heifers get off the bus.
Every heifer I'm going to, the movie's going to lose me,
every heifer who gets off that,
every cow on your dairy
thinks she's going to die every minute of her life.
Those heifers have gone 22 hours,
they're two months away from calving,
22 hours without food and water.
They get off, they're released into a pen,
and now they walk around the pen
and they walk completely around the facility,
all the way around the freestalls.
And it isn't until their third loop,
all 50 of them have done the loop three times,
they all finally tell each other,
"We're not going to die here, let's eat.
"Let's drink."
And then my heifers have been trained to a headlock in Texas
and have never, never, never seen a freestall.
I don't have to train 'em to use a freestall.
That night, 49 out of 50 will be in bed.
I do have one, there's always one,
and the next day she'll be in bed.
She got the memo a day late how to use the beds.
It took us weeks to get this guy fixed.
This was $13 million facility for 4,000 cows.
It can be, it's just that easy.
It doesn't matter what size.
We played the same rules in Lisowe's 25-cow dairy.
It doesn't matter what size.
Food in the morning, get 'em to bed.
Make the bed comfortable, it's just that easy.
And with that, questions and thoughts, we'll end here.
Thanks for your attention,
and we'll go to questions.
(applause)