Ethan Haywood
Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Select Sires Podcast. I'm your host Ethan Haywood and today we are excited to talk heifer inventory and management as well as some specific technologies that are available to our Select Sires customers. With us here today is Emily Middleton, regional consulting manager for CentralStar Cooperative. Emily, thanks so much for taking the time to be here with us today.
Emily Middleton
Thanks for having me Ethan.
Ethan Haywood
Emily, you are one of the biggest data people that I know within our company and really love to dig into it. And it's one of my favorite things to do before a presentation or as we're going to get our feet on the ground at a dairy. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your process of getting here to the role that you're in now with CentralStar.
Emily Middleton
My name's Emily. I grew up on a beef farm in the thumb of Michigan, and I really got involved in the dairy industry through college, took classes in dairy science, joined dairy club. And then a lot of my experience comes from breeding cows part-time all the way through college. And I just really fell in love with the industry. I've always been really interested in reproduction and genetics. So I went on to do my master's degree with Dr. Pursley in reproductive physiology and management. A lot of my research was focused around the high fertility cycle. And then after graduate school, I actually took a position as a dairy nutritionist. I did that for a year and a half before coming to CentralStar. Just again, a really good fit with my love for reproduction, my love for data and drilling through stuff. So I got hired on as a records analysis consultant at CentralStar toward the end of 2020. So I've been there since then. And then in 2022, I became the regional consulting manager for Michigan and Indiana. So I still do a lot of data analysis, records analysis, inventory strategies, genetic audits, that type of fun stuff.
Ethan Haywood
And the inventory strategies especially is such a huge topic right now within our industry. Where is our overall heifer inventory? What are heifers worth versus what are beef on dairy calves worth? And trying to help our customers find that optimal spot so that every single time they go to breed a cow, they're confident that they're making the right decision as well as the decision that's going to profit their business the most. And one of the ways that you come into the picture in that process for customers is the use of the Optimal Genetic Pathways Calculator or the OGP calculator. Can you tell us a little bit about what is the OGP calculator? And then we'll dive into some of the details of the inputs and the outputs.
Emily Middleton
So the OGP calculator is a great tool that Select Sires has. There's essentially two parts to it. So the first part is a very detailed calculator that uses individual herd variables to determine how many replacements that dairy needs. And then the second part is to create a breeding strategy to generate that number of replacements. The breeding strategies are very customizable and can be adapted to any individual farm's needs and goals, whether they want to use sexed semen, beef semen, conventional semen, embryos. I don't think any two strategies that I do look alike. The goal is just to make it work for the farm, because when we're talking about inventories in heifers, the key is compliance and something that the farm can do right and do successfully. Another key aspect of the program is it also allows us to easily rank females on any genetic index that we'd like, so that the highest genetic animals are given the opportunity to create replacements for the herd. So ultimately, the OGP allows us to combine inventory management with a genetic strategy to maximize a dairy's genetic progress and their profitability.
Ethan Haywood
And you're not underselling it at all when you say it's a very detailed calculator. It's incredible how many variables you put in this calculator and customize it to every single herd, every single situation, and even the time period and goals specific for that herd. So discussing a little bit on the data input side, your first step is normally teasing data out of whatever herd management software they're utilizing. Tell us a little bit about that process and what details you commonly look at to plug into the front side of the calculator.
Emily Middleton
Yeah, so there's a lot. And the best part is, you know, we're using all that farm's data, so their variables can change from time to time point. So we do update these calculators at least quarterly. I have a fair bit that are bi-monthly and then some probably even warrant monthly updates. So things like summer conception rates, we can adjust for that. So a large input would be conception rates and the overall reproductive efficiency of the farm. So we capture that through conception rates and we break that down into first lactation, second plus lactation and heifer. We also break that apart by semen type. So we look at sexed semen differently from conventional and beef. We even look at beef sorted, dairy embryo, beef embryo. And we also look at first through fifth plus service. So we're really trying to capture the dynamics of reproduction in the herd and make sure that we are creating the right amount of pregnancies. Some other things we take into consideration are like days open, calving interval, heifer breeding efficiency, age at first calving. So there's several different things that are indicative of the reproductive program success. Also very important when calculating inventory is to know the cull rate and non-completion rate, heifer non-completion rate of the herd. We take into account even like the gender ratios of the semen, you know, usually farms, should be 47% female for conventional, 90% female for sexed. But, you know, it can vary from farm to farm. Take into account stillbirth rates, aborts, pregnant cows that leave the herd, when cows leave the herd, for example, are most of them leaving in the first 30 days of milk. That might adjust a few background calculations. Yeah, just you name it, it's probably in the calculator.
Ethan Haywood
It's a huge amount of data and you've gotten very good at as well as others in similar positions to you on how to manipulate that data very efficiently to try and leverage it the best possible way for our farmers. And once you start leveraging that data, your desired output is every individual cow, what should they get bred to on what particular service and the same for heifers. But in that process, you are also trying to compensate for what is the overall goal. Talk to us about how do you strategize what different farms need for replacements, depending on what their plan and situation looks like.
Emily Middleton
Yeah, so the key is to talk to the farm. A lot of times we'll run these strategies, you know, get all the data in there, and then we'll meet with the farm and go through the breeding strategy together to kind of see where they want to be. Ultimately, we need to know what their desired herd size is, and that includes lactating and dry cows. So whether that's, you know, they want to maintain herd size, expand, downsize a little bit, that's really something that we need to make sure we're on the same page for. We discuss, you know, what kind of semen types do they want to use? Do they want a sexed and beef strategy? Are they not quite there? Want to use some conventional semen? Figure that out. What's their plan after first service? Do they want to use some beef semen on those later services or not? Like I said, it's very customizable. Another important thing to discuss is their buffer. So always recommend incorporating some type of buffer in these strategies. You know, we take a lot into account, but nothing in this world is perfect. So typically that'd be like a 5-20% buffer. A few years ago, I'd say most of my farms didn't want to make more than 5-10% extra heifers. But now a lot of people are pushing that out to 15%, 20%, even 30% extra. Another key thing is dairy culls. If they want to budget to create a certain amount of dairy culls per year, we can also include that into the calculator.
Ethan Haywood
And as this program continues to get more and more sophisticated, in your time in utilizing the OGP, what changes have you seen made and how do you see them affecting the calculations?
Emily Middleton
Yeah, so Greg Collins is constantly updating the OGP to make it relevant and easier to use. I would say I can do them a lot faster than I was doing them a few years ago. Part of that's experience, but part of it's just streamlining the inputs. They've made some progress with like, you know, automating some calculations, streamlining some inputs. So they really aren't all that time consuming. Yes, they take some time, but I would say it's gotten a lot faster, a lot more efficient. One of my favorite things about these more current OGPs is there's an indexing where it allows us to rank all the females based on whatever index we'd like to use. And then we can say like, oh, 30th percentile and higher is on the sexed strategy. And it'll sort those cows into those groups for you. And then it spits out the genetic codes. So it'll be like, these animals get sexed, these animals get beef. And we can actually import those genetic codes into DairyComp at least, and farms find that really useful on breeding day to know what semen type to use. And it also helps when we're applying matings, individual cow matings, to know what semen type each animal's getting.
Ethan Haywood
Right. A lot of the guess work out of it, making every move feel purposeful in a time when margins are tight and individual animal values are so high, yet it doesn't take any more time than it would normally take to read your SMS® (Select Mating Service®
) mating, if that's a program that you're utilizing.
Emily Middleton
Yep, exactly. Yep. It's become streamlined and time efficient. And like you said, there's information for every cow and so it just makes compliance a lot better and I track these OGPs and I can show you know we're making the amount of heifers that we said we were going to make. It's kind of fun to see the progress that we make.
Ethan Haywood
One of my favorite things to see as a farm gets started on the OGP program and gets through a couple of years with it is not only making the number of heifers that they're desiring to make, but also smoothing out those humps and valleys that we see in calving flow. How do you manipulate the system to try and reduce slugs and provide more consistency, which obviously has benefits not only in the freshening pen and the calf raising areas, but to overall cash flow on the dairy?
Emily Middleton
Yeah, so that's a big deal, right? You know, having an even steady flow of cows going through your facilities. The key to getting there is, you know, updating that OGP, you know, whether we're looking at that quarterly or bimonthly and making little tweaks. So, for example, a herd might need 150 heifers for this quarter, but then they've got a calving slug coming in. And so we might actually need to up the beef so that we're still on target. You know, one strategy you create, it might change, the herd might need something a little bit different in a couple months. So that's again where the flexibility of the program is really nice, and then making sure that we're updating and checking in every couple months can help really even out those calving slugs.
Ethan Haywood
Another scenario is recently I got to watch you present on a farm that was in expansion mode and they're trying to figure out the best way to build to their expansion and synchronize when those extra heifers they're starting to generate now will be ready to freshen in conjunction with when they think they're moving into the new facility. How do you go about approaching something in an expansion type scenario with the OGP?
Emily Middleton
Within an expansion type scenario, the first thing is to set that desired herd size of where they want to be. And that helps us figure out how many heifers it's going to take to get there. But then we also have to make some considerations. So there's only so much sexed semen we're probably comfortable using in cows before we start hurting fertility a little bit. You know, sexed semen generally does better in earlier services and younger animals. So then this scenario that you're referring to, you know, we took out the beef semen because obviously we need to make heifers, but we actually put quite a bit of conventional semen in to help get those heifers from those later services.
Ethan Haywood
Another scenario that I know you get to work with, because I get to work with this herd too, is a herd that has multiple breeds. How do you approach trying to have multiple breeds within the calculator? And do you calculate those together or separate? What is the normal protocol?
Emily Middleton
Depends on the farm. So again, you know, these are very individualized to farms. Some herds have, you know, they're mostly Holstein and they might have a few Jerseys sprinkled in there and they just want the Jerseys bred a little bit differently. So they'll just get their own line on the breeding strategy that, and just like, okay, if it's a Jersey, they get just sexed and beef, something like that. There's herds that have a certain population of Jersey cows. They kind of want this target herd size for Holstein, this target herd size for Jersey. So in that case, the OGP does have a tab for where you can run two different breeds, which is really nice. So we can do the Holsteins on one strategy and then the Jersey herd on a different strategy. Sometimes just again, depending on the farm, I'll just run two separate OGPs if it's just, you know, too hard to run these in one file, but yes, there's a lot of ways to go about it and just kind of depends what the farm is looking to do with those different breeds.
Ethan Haywood
And all the data that you're putting into the OGP can really be leveraged for some other reasons as well, as we normally see in some of the on-farm presentations that our cooperative staff put together and perform throughout the country and the world. What other things do you tend to notice or take note of or try and include in your presentations as you're going through this process and picking apart the data to make sure it's complete?
Emily Middleton
So when I do an OGP or I guess when I do records analysis for the farm, I like to start with the OGP because I feel like it just gives us a very good 1,000-foot picture of what's going on in the dairy. We get a peek at the conception rates. We get a peek at cull rates, non-completion rates, kind of an idea of where to go from there. And I'll go over those inputs with the farm, and then we might do some troubleshooting if maybe conception rates aren't quite where we'd like to see them. Maybe their non-completion rates a little higher than desired, and we'll get into that and why that is. So I feel like it's a very good starting point to have discussions with the herd. Then you get into the breeding strategy, allows us to talk about the goals of the herd, how to implement this, what they need to make this work. And then the OGP has a lot of graphs, which are useful. Some are depicting what their current inventory is. And we can see kind of a line of like, this is how many heifers you need. And then every month, this is how many you have. There’re also future predictions. So if we stay on this strategy, this is what it's going to look like five months from now, that type of thing. We can also see, you know, how many beef calves they have due by month. So I have some farms that really appreciate that graph because they contract out, you know, calf buyers or people to come pick up their calves and need to know how many they're going to have every month. The OGP also has some other features in it that I use once in a while, like a semen calculator. So you can do some math to see how much more profitable switching to a sexed and beef strategy would be compared to using conventional semen, different things like that, that are within the tool that you can get out.
Ethan Haywood
That was the next point I wanted to lean into so thanks for bringing us there. Really I've seen you quantify the value of genetics throughout this program whether you're utilizing the information to generate a quartile analysis and try and justify what you're doing or you're looking at getting on a new program whether you're going to sexed and beef semen from a more traditional conventional program and you know what is the opportunity for additional income as well as the precision breeding benefit there. Or maybe we're looking at jumping onto the NxGEN®
program and making that genetic investment, but we want to be sure that if we're doing that, then we're using those units very precisely and using them in the correct cows. As you go through, does this data and system communicate with other systems of data and calculation that Select Sires has available to their customers?
Emily Middleton
Yeah, so you put the data in the OGP. I wouldn't say it works with another program, but there's data there that we can use for all of those things. You know, that it's already been collected. Something has been calculated and already graphed out for us. So we can tease those out. We can also use it in tandem with some of the other programs Select Sires offers. So for example, the OGP tells me how many heifers I need, and then I can pair that with a genetic audit is another Select Sires program and to show people like okay this is how many heifers. You know, some graphs and stuff are already calculated for us that we can use in presenting to farms. There's a lot of data in there. Like I'll pull some of the data out from the OGP and help calculate, you know, how many heifers that we've got coming down the pipeline. We can use it in conjunction with our genetic data. So we need, you know, 150 heifers a month who are going to make these heifers and rank our females. Select Sires has a genetic audit tool that we can also use to pair these two things together.
Ethan Haywood
As precision breeding becomes more and more popular in our industry and more available to every single producer that we work with, how does a producer who's interested in shifting to a more calculated and managed program like the OGP calculator get in contact with someone to be able to utilize it?
Emily Middleton
I would say talk to your Select Sires service representative and start from there.
Ethan Haywood
It's really cool that this program is available all across the country for any of our listeners and that we would be excited to try and get them enrolled to make sure that the breeding decisions are 100% confident and calculated every time they thaw a straw of semen. Emily, thank you so much for taking the time to be here with us today. This is great and we hope that many producers start looking into utilizing the OGP calculator if they're not already doing so by contacting their Select Sires representative. Thanks for your time Emily.
Emily Middleton
Thanks for having me.