Inspire Cattle Solutions

Income on Farm increased by £9,000 per annum

Mastitis and Ketosis Risk decreased by 25% and 80% respectively

Income from Vet Advice increased by £3,000 each 3 months

How was this achieved?

Visits to farms showed the current management on the dairy farms. Vets monitored the disease levels from the farm and the practice. Inspire Cattle Solutions provided an Evidence Based Report supporting the costs of mastitis and ketosis/case and showed the best scientific interventions to reduce the risk of these diseases. Examples were evidence supporting the use of dips and forestripping milk against mastitis outcomes and the use of body condition scoring and BHBA testing to predict ketosis in cows. 

Evidence-based Veterinary Medicine is the practice of searching available scientific literature supporting a clinical question (such as “What is the average cost of a case of mastitis?” or What is the evidence supporting the use of pre-dips to reduce new cases of mastitis?”) and then applying this in practice.

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Well researched literature can help to guide opinions

Evidence-based interventions could then be put in place and data recorded after 3 months to show the differences seen on farm.

Visits to the farms showed that mastitis and the numbers of sick cows after calving were at unacceptable levels, at 12% new cases of mastitis/year and 8% Displaced Abomasum (DA)/year. 

Farmers were spending too much of their time caring for sick cows rather than concentrating on health and productivity. The vet practice was believing the herd dairy data recorded by the farmer rather than actually measuring mastitis tube sales or monitoring BHBA levels in fresh cows. 

Altering Fibre length and content in dry cows and increasing feed space access reduced ketosis to <10% for the next 3 months and inctroducing pre-dip and clean wiping techniques reduced mastitis to 8%. 

The vet practice achieved more consultation opportunities from the feedback of their customers and they could rest in the knowledge that their interventions wwere supported by the latest scientific research.

Inspire Cattle Solutions can show great Value from Consultancy

All of this was possible because the data was able to capture real situations on farm and tie this to best practices elsewhere in the Globe.

Evidence-based veterinary medicine can create Opportunities for producers, practices and consultancy!

Processors, Retailers and Co-ops buy milk from Dairy Farms: many have quality assurance schemes that are intended to support farmers, consumers and their own businesses. The reality is that pleasing everyone is often very challenging. Farmers need a profitable business and aim for optimum health and productivity from the animals in their care. Buyers need to ensure milk quality and a consistent supply  and the consumers’ opinions are always important to everyone. However, the latter is often a subject that is frequently changeable. So building strategies that cover everyone’s needs requires skilled and experienced advisor teams, with veterinary science at its heart. 

Higher margins and healthy animals drive sustainable farms

Farmers

The beginning of this value chain lies with the cow herself: She must be in a consistent environment: changes in feed, routine and daily management have a great impact on health and performance. When designing assurance schemes, expert veterinary advice is critical to ensure a low disease risk while optimising reproductive potential. Too often, policies can focus on parameters that have good intentions but lack enough delivery on profitability. Increasing longevity of cows in the herd is a good example of this: a policy that pushes culling rates down can risk the delay of better genetics entering the herd and increase disease risks unless understanding the value of heifers’ lactation persistency is brought into the discussion. 

Excellent quality and consistent supply are goals of milk buyers

Suppliers

Lowering disease risks, Optimising reproduction and dealing with heat stressors can greatly increase the consistency of supply for the milk buyer. In the same way, milk quality is also linked to these factors, emphasising the importance of veterinary advice. Understanding the marginal milk value (the value of milk beyond her maintenance and feed costs) can help conversations between milk buyers and producers: especially when dealing with the uncomfortable news of reducing milk prices. Good veterinary consultancy can help to provide answers to challenging times.

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Consumer opinion drives buying choices

Media and Consumers

Consumers and social media can drive policies and short term management wants from retailers and co-ops. Antimicrobial reduction, organic milk, “factory farming” and other issues all need quick and scientifically structured replies from the suppliers. Once again, veterinary scientific advice from an expert can make or break a brand or company name in this fickle media world. 

Fortunately, INSPIRE CATTLE SOLUTIONS have extensive experience in all of these areas and have produced visible value from each of these steps in terms of milk volume and profitability in supply.

Contact us to prepare for 2019 and SUCCESS

Inspire Cattle Solutions is Passionate about Efficiency and Cow Well-being

What is the greatest animal management challenge your dairies face in 2019? Whatever the answer, we can work with you to find a solution. We can design a project customised entirely to your needs and ensure that the results are accountable and deliverable in YOUR timescale. We try hard to link any changes that we advise to show value back to your business. Efficiency goals usually focus on profits as well as time saved for personnel or animal time budgets. We have the experience and capability to do this anywhere on the Globe.

As an example: a major retailer was wanting to market milk products to its customers by reassuring them that the cows supplying them were “happy” (in this case and in their opinion, this meant lower disease risks on farm). Representative farms of the suppliers were visited and aspects of management were studied in terms of disease risk. Stall size, barn design, time budgets, feed and water availability, heat abatement, and parlour routines were all studied. Dairy data from the farms was analysed and it appeared that subclinical ketosis was higher than average. On closer inspection, dry cow fibre ration and feed space had opportunities to be optimised on most sites. Within less than a month of changes being made, ketosis was reduced by 70% on average and yields were up 2kg/day/animal on farm in the fresh groups. Incomes for producers were increased by at least $10k/year and the retailer could back up their claim of lower disease risks. The farmers realised that they spent less time treating sick cows as well, freeing up more time to dedicate to what they like to do well: looking after healthy animals.

When you are planning your 2019 management goals, think of Inspire Cattle Solutions: we want to help you to bring healthier cows’ milk to YOUR customers 

Contact 0044 222118 if you want to meet at EuroTier 2018 today!

Inspire Cattle Solutions is now at EuroTier in Hannover! This huge agricultural fair is the largest in Europe and has every agricultural business type imaginable on display. From Animal Health, Education institutes and Feed businesses to machinery and data solutions, this is an exciting event to put into your calendar.

Today, Inspire Cattle Solutions will be there, so arrange a meeting if you want to talk about our services: Consultancy on Lean Projects; Research support and Training/Workshops for professionals.

Alternatively, CONTACT US and we will listen to your needs.

How do you improve the lifestyle of producers by enhancing cow welfare?

Whether they own 2 cows or 2,000 cows, farmers are extremely busy people. They have animals to nurture, a business to run and a family to support. All of these have multiple demands and priorities can be easily distracted. So the key to making significant changes is to keep focus on whichever is the primary need. Inspire Cattle Solutions excels at this, in any geography!

The best question to ask any producer is the “magic wand” question: “If you had just one wish, what would you change about the management of your farm?”. This nearly always produces a surprising result. As a vet, you expect “reduce disease” or “make more money” to be the obvious answers. However, in my experience, it is often something very different. “Spend more time with my children at weekends”; “Improve communication between my family members that run the farm with me”; “Allow me to provide more facilities for my poor village labourers” are just a few of the answers I have come across.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT:

So how do you translate this into improving cow welfare? Often, making cows more comfortable or reducing their risks of disease have knock-on effects on productivity: more milk, better quality milk and better fertility for another healthy lactation after the present one. Learning how to make changes and SHOW the value from these is the key to excellent consulting.

Ensuring that everyone is aligned with definitions of diseases and risks is the first step. If you can define and measure things, you can manage them efficiently. Now, you can measure the current situation in order to tell what position you are in at the start. When this is done, you can look towards the data you have collected in order to find a single, most important priority point to fix: mastitis? heat abatement? ketosis? communication? training? Then you can design a project around that priority.

Making sure that everyone is accountable and responsible for their own components of this project is the next stage: “WHO does WHAT by WHEN”. Communication is always improved by ensuring that everyone is kept up to date throughout the project regularly: this is where good consultancy really excels!

When a project is complete, re-evaluate all of the key data, ALWAYS connecting back to the original issue. If for example, this was about fixing ketosis, then obviously show ketosis data but many times, the original “magic wand” wish was something else: so if it was “spend more time with the kids”, make sure you measured the amount of time spent at the start and at the end: after all, this is what the customer wanted!

Examples of Inspire Cattle Solutions’ consultancy have been:

  1. $1.6M more saleable milk per year by improving cow cooling (Pakistan)
  2. This project also allowed producers to give their poor labourers better accommodation, a canteen to ensure they weren’t hungry and a sports field on some farms
  3. Changing lives of producers by doubling milk income which allowed their children to have access to education for the first time in their generation (East Africa)
  4. Allowing farmers more time at weekends by not having to fix so many sick cows by reducing ketosis (UK)

There are many others.

CONTACT US TO CHANGE YOUR COMPANY’S IDEAS ON FARM FUTURE-PROOFING TODAY