Marginal gains offer long-term improvements (March 25)

Beef-cross calf-rearing decisions are resulting in assured, high-value sales for two dairy businesses and freeing up time to focus on cow management.

TEXT PHIL CHRISTOPHER

What’s the similarity between managing a team of professional cyclists and a high performance dairy herd? The answer is that the better you become, the harder it is to find large scale improvements.

Back in 2003, GB cycling could be described as low- to mid-table among elite international teams, and won four medals – two gold, one silver and one bronze – in 16 events in Athens at the 2004 Olympics. But just four years later in 2008, the medal tally in Beijing was 400% higher at 14, including eight golds. And this was not entirely due to a generation of ultra-gifted riders. In 2003, Dave Brailsford was appointed team manager and he was the origin of 2008’s Olympic triumph. In 2010, he became the leader of Team Sky and two years  later Bradley Wiggins won the first of the team’s six Tour de France wins from 2012 to 2018.

Since then, Dave’s ‘secret sauce’ has become known in sport and business alike as the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’. This involves pursuing improvements as small as 1% across every aspect of the sport, including the minor details.

And these small gains, when added up, can make for a substantial and long-term overall improvement, as long as they’re made permanent in the team’s mindset and daily behaviour.

Minor detail

A good example of a minor detail on one UK dairy unit, where calves have ad-lib access to milk, is spraying the communal teats during the daytime and evening, with sterilising solution to help improve hygiene standards. Other aspects of the dairying system – such as beef-calf management and revenue – could also be enhanced significantly by taking advantage of off-farm expertise in pursuing marginal gains.

Changes made by two dairy businesses – one based in Cheshire and the other in Shropshire – have reduced overall workloads and freed up more time to concentrate on cow management while, at the same time, securing assured and fair values for high-quality beef-cross calves. At Worth Partners’ 400-cow unit, based near Congleton, the calving jack has seen little action recently, and what better indication could there be that the unit’s dry-cow management and sire selection are gold standard?

Around 10 years ago, sexed semen was introduced and is now used on between 30 and 40 of the best performing cows and on all maiden heifers.

Beef crosses

Calving ease is a significant factor when selecting black and-white and Brown Swiss sires to breed replacement heifers. But a more recent change at Worth Partners about three years ago was to begin using male sexed semen to maximise the income stream from ‘high-value, low-risk’ beef-cross calves. The chosen breed is Longhorn and calves are sold on contract to Buitelaar, for its dairy-herd-to-fine dining production system. This superseded chasing high auction prices, often unsuccessfully, with Belgian Blue cross calves, according to James Worth. “Too many only survived birth with help from the calving aid,” he says. All the sires he uses are selected from Buitelaar’s approved list for gestation length, easy calving, calf vigour, high growth rates and, ultimately, eating quality. The Worth’s Longhorn sweeper bull – used on cows and maiden heifers after three unsuccessful AI attempts – has also been screened for genetic merit.

Calf average birth weight is now between 45kg and 48kg. “And they are the easiest calves we’ve ever reared,” says James. “The Longhorn is a robust breed and calves are pretty much bombproof,” he adds.

At the Morris family’s Shropshire-based all-grass unit, Alison Morris makes similar observations about the business’ first batch of 30 Longhorn-dairy crosses: “We saw zero assisted calvings, and calves are enthusiastic feeders and have lively temperaments from birth making them a pleasure to rear,” she says.

The Longhorn-cross is set to supersede Angus for use on most cows outside the 140-cow pedigree herd’s top-flight replacement heifer dams.

Alison’s husband Nigel and their two daughters help run and manage the herd, with part-time help from Michelle Hanley. Buitelaar collects calves from all its contracted dairy herds on a weekly basis, at a minimum of 55kg and 14 days old, and they are moved to one of its specialist rearing units.

On both the Worth Partners’ and Morris family’s units, calves are fed four litres of milk twice a day, which sees most achieve a daily liveweight gain of at least 1kg. So they are easily able to reach company’s contracted minimum liveweight for calves.

Open book pricing means that herds supplying calves to the company know in advance what they’ll be paid. Both businesses report prompt seven-working-day payment, which makes budgeting calf income easy. And both units are rearing calves for fewer weeks each year, allowing them to spend more time focusing on cow management.