Technology aids herd management decisions

DEER PARK, Wis. — Years of dedication to milk quality and overall cow health drove Kristin Quist, her family and their farm management team to be named the 2024 recipient of Boehringer Ingelheim’s Dairy First Award.

“We’re always chasing goals,” Quist said. “We’ve always had the mentality of never being satisfied. If we achieve a goal, we’re going to keep continuing to raise the bar, getting better. We’re a highly productive herd and that is how we’ve chosen to manage over the years.”

Quist is the herd manager at her family’s 1,200-cow dairy, Minglewood Inc., which she operates alongside her husband, Jacob, and her parents, Kevin and Roxie Solum.

Part of the Minglewood herd is housed in a robotic dairy barn and milked with eight DeLaval robotic milking machines. The rest of the herd is milked in the farm’s double-9 parlor.

“Milk quality is important to us, and having a low somatic cell count is our goal all the time,” Quist said. “Right now, we are running around 100,000 between both systems.”

Milk quality and animal health go hand-in-hand, Quist said, and vigilance is the key to achieving high levels of both. She credits the installation of the smaXtec health management system just over two years ago with bettering the farm’s management.

“We were on the DeLaval activity system for years, but we only had activity data, we didn’t have rumination data,” Quist said. “There were a lot of things we were missing because we didn’t know we didn’t have the data. Now to be able to identify the handful of animals in a 1,200-cow herd that we need to check every day saves us a lot of time. We look at utilizing the system like having an additional employee.”

With that data, Quist said they are catching disease 3-4 days before they might show clinical signs.

“We’re catching those cases very early, very sub-clinical, not waiting until it’s a true, clinical full-blown mastitis, where she is sick and down,” Quist said.

The system’s mastitis detection feature has driven improvements in the herd’s udder health and milk quality, Quist said. They catch potential mastitis with the tool, and then they California Mastitis Test right away on the potential sick cows. If the CMT is positive, they culture on-farm to determine how to proceed.

Because of the data garnered from the system, the use of antibiotics is rare.

“We’ll use them when it is warranted, but we have learned that treating a cow with fluids as the first line is going to get us a lot farther,” Quist said. “We averaged 1.4 treated cows out of the tank in December and we’re averaging 1.1 this month. We just don’t have chronic mastitis cows anymore.”

Quist believes that as technology becomes more commonplace and easier to use on dairy farms of all sizes, the industry will reap the benefits of using real-time data for herd management decisions. She said as an industry, there has been a tendency among farmers to be treating cows that do not need it to make themselves feel good.

“By utilizing the data we have and not just going off our feelings, we are making great strides at doing better, for our cows, our farms, our industry and our consumers,” Quist said.

In Quist’s mind, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so she emphasizes preventative measures such as vaccinations and dry treating.

Using data from the health management system, Quist strives to empower her entire team to focus on practices to help reach management goals.

“We have regular monthly staff meetings with our milking team, complete with a translator,” Quist said. “We make sure we’re always communicating with them where things are, what is going well and areas we can continue to improve.”

Those improvements have helped Quist and her family reach many of their goals.

Because they sell their milk to a cheese plant, Burnett Dairy Cooperative, high components are a priority for Quist as is volume. They currently average 95 pounds of milk per cow per day.

“We ultimately want them to be able to make more cheese out of one tank of our milk,” Quist said. “We sat here three years ago and said we wanted to consistently be shipping 7 pounds of solids. That goal quickly became 7.5 pounds and now it’s 8 pounds. We’re hitting 8 pounds of combined fat and protein in the robots and 7.7 pounds in the parlor, with 100% Holsteins — that is pretty impressive.”