Top Performers

Doug and Julie Heintz and Dayne and Katie Heintz of Heintz Badger Valley Farm LLC  Caledonia, Minnesota | Houston County | 175 cows milking

How many times a day do you milk, and what is your current herd average, butterfat and protein? Our herd is milked by three robotic milking units: two Lely A3s and one Lely A3 Next. Our herd averages 2.9 visits to the robots per day. Our herd average is 37,571 pounds of milk with 1,498 pounds of fat and 1,156 pounds of protein.

Describe your housing and milking facility. The free-flow milking robots are located in a 114-stall, sanded-bedded freestall barn. A year ago, we changed the ventilation with the addition of three VES-Artex fans and relocated the 15 panel fans we already had according to the VES-Artex recommendations. We created the environment of a tunnel-vented barn but it is still a hybrid barn because we still have the open side walls. It cost about 10% of what we were quoted for tunnel ventilation. Dry cows and close-up heifers are in our old tiestall barn that we converted so we could have 56 sand-bedded free stalls. Two years ago, we added tunnel ventilation to the dry cow barn and covered their feed lane. The rest of our heifer housing is open sheds with a bedding pack. Calves under a month of age are housed in calf huts.

Who is part of your farm team, and what are their roles? Doug and Dayne are both full time. Dayne works with the calves, hauls a majority of the manure and does herd health. We each have a part in the fieldwork. Doug mixes feed. We also have a part-time herdsman, Matt Feldmeier, who comes in five mornings a week and has been here for 25 years. All three of us take turns doing fetch groups. Matt does fetch groups the five mornings he is here and Doug and Dayne do the other nine milkings throughout the week. Doug’s wife, Julie does all the books. Dayne’s wife, Katie, is a nurse at the Gundersen Health System location in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and on her days off helps with the farm’s lawn, decorating and other similar upkeep. We also have some neighbor girls who come on weekends or evenings when we are too busy to help feed calves.

We also have a Minnesota Dairy Initiative team we meet with quarterly. We originally set the team up when we were building the freestall barn for the robots. After we moved in, our first meeting was, “OK, now let’s switch this from the builders to management.”

What is your herd health program? Our veterinarian comes once a month. They check all open cows that have not been bred, do checks for pregnancy and then recheck everything that is pregnant the following month.

For our vaccination program, calves receive Once PMH at a month of age. At 4-5 months, they are vaccinated for Bang’s, bovine viral diarrhea, blackleg and more. At dry off, cows receive Virus Shield 6+ VL5 HB,
Scour Boss 9 and JVAC. Heifers on pasture in the summer are vaccinated for pink eye. In November and February, every cow in the barn receives a nasal vaccination for pneumonia.

What does your dry cow and transition program consist of? A lot of our herd is milking more than 100 pounds when it is time to dry off. So, we typically kick them out into the dry cow pen for 24 hours, then bring them back in and milk them, and then dry them off. We dry them off with Quartermaster and a teat sealant. Our dry period is 50-60 days. We have one group of dry cows. Their ration consists of corn silage, an ionic salt and a lower potassium alfalfa mixed with wheat straw to dilute out the energy. We recently added a 20- by 40- foot calving pen converted from a lean to off the dry cow barn that used to house heifers. Once they freshen, cows receive a liquid glucose feed in the robotic milking units for 22 days after calving.

What is the composition of your ration, and how has that changed in recent years? Our partial mixed ration is high forage. We have a year’s worth of corn silage layered from field to field in the bunker, so it is very consistent. Our baleage is divided into three categories: lactating, dry cow and heifer. We’re trying to feed a balanced/average diet on the baleage. We use our own ground corn. We use canola meal for our protein source and we also have a mineral mix.

In the robotic milking units, we have two types of pellets: our base of corn gluten pellets for the whole herd and our custom robot pellet. Because the corn gluten is separate, we can put a lot more goodies in the custom pellet. We’re targeting cows based on fat and protein-corrected milk, and feeding accordingly.

Tell us about the forages you plant and detail your harvest strategies. On our seed down year for alfalfa, we use oats for a nurse crop. Weather permitting, we spray it and leave it for erosion control. If we’re not able to do that, we bale it. We plant HarvXtra Roundup Ready alfalfa. We use a four-cut system. We aim to harvest the baleage at 35%-45% moisture. The round bales are in-line wrapped. One thing that has helped us a lot is adding a used triple mower four years ago. Dayne can cut all the hay in two days, which used to take two of us a week.

We plant a 109-day up to 113-day, high grain corn for silage. In August, we hire the corn sprayed with fungicide using a drone. About 130 acres are custom chopped using a kernel processor. We aim for 65% moisture.

What is your average somatic cell count and how does that affect your production? Our average last year was about 110,000. We use the SCC on the Dairy Herd Improvement Association reports to find our high cows so we can either treat them or sell them. The robots also measure conductivity, which is another way of sensing SCC.

What change has created the biggest improvement in your herd average? When we switched to having two types of pellets in fed in the robotic milking unit. Last year, our herd average was 34,511 and this year, we are at 37,571 pounds. The butterfat went up 150 pounds, protein went up 80 pounds and milk production went up 3,000 pounds. Paul McCormick, who is Doug and Julie’s son-in-law, does our nutrition work. He suggested the change. In the original plan, we did this for cost savings, but then with the addition of a lot of extra goodies in the second robot pellet, the production responded in an unreal way.

Also, the changes in ventilation have helped our cows maintain their milk levels on hot days, and the dry cows are staying cool.

What technology do you use to monitor your herd? Our cows wear activity and rumination collars that pair with our robotic milking units. We just put in cameras. We’re watching them mostly for calving, and then we’re also monitoring the barn just in case anything goes wrong there, or to observe if there are too many cows waiting to get milked.

What is your breeding program, and what role does genetics play in your production level? Every animal is genetically mated. We use the mating results on every animal for the first two breedings. On the third breeding we start using Angus. We only use proven bulls, not genomic bulls. The udder is probably the most important to us because of the robotic milking units. For the genomic bulls, that is one of their least predicted traits. So, to keep the udders, the teat placement and everything correct, we have maintained using proven bulls.

We have been a closed herd since the beginning. When we moved into the robots, we only culled two cows in the first 10 months. We had really good udders. We have sold a lot of cows for dairy over the years. Every year we sell a group of 20-30 cows or more.

List three management strategies that have helped you attain your production and component level. The importance of having an MDI team. We meet every three months, and having everybody that we deal with in one room is just so efficient. We don’t have people stopping daily or weekly. They help us find our weak links and achieve our goals.

Consistency with our feed. Our feed doesn’t change. We always have a month or so of old corn silage left before going into the new so there’s consistency on the corn silage, and we also have consistency on the hay.

Being open-minded. You have to be willing to try new things like when we did the robots or started using HarvXtra alfalfa.

Tell us about your farm and your plans for the dairy in the next year. Doug started dairy farming in 1983 as a junior in high school after his dad and grandpa died as a result of a fire. At that time there were 16 cows milked in a stanchion barn. He kept expanding over the years. In 2008, the cows moved to the freestall barn and we switched to robotic milking. Dayne joined the farm full time in 2015 after working with robotic startups. We are in the process of transferring the farm to him. This year we will probably make small changes around the farm but nothing major. We want to find more efficiencies as opportunities arise.