Did She Make It?

There’s an older episode of The Dairy Podcast Show with Dr. Scott Earnest that I find myself going back to every so often.

Not because the ideas are particularly complicated, but because one of them has stuck with me: slippage.

One long pipeline

Think about 100 heifer calves born on a dairy farm.

How many of those 100 eventually walk into the milking herd?

We tend to measure the pieces separately: calf mortality, scours, pneumonia, growth rates, breeding performance, and age at first calving. But they’re all part of the same pipeline.

Where animals slip out

A calf dies at two weeks. Another survives pneumonia but never grows particularly well. A heifer doesn’t breed. Another gets pregnant but aborts. One calves but leaves shortly after freshening.

Every time that happens, another animal we intended to turn into a productive cow has slipped out of the system.

And the later it happens, the more expensive that slippage becomes.

A two-year investment

By 20 months we’ve fed, housed, bedded, vaccinated, and bred that animal. We’ve put nearly two years of labour into her.

With the increasing use of sexed semen, genomic testing, and advanced reproductive technologies, we may also have deliberately invested in creating that particular heifer.

Which makes a simple question surprisingly valuable: of the heifers we intended to raise, how many actually made it?

And then the more important question: where did we lose the rest?

Look back to the beginning

What I like about the podcast is that the conversation eventually works its way back to the beginning: maternity management, colostrum, hygiene, and the environment we’re putting newborn calves into.

Because slippage at 18 months can sometimes have its beginnings at 18 hours.

That’s why I keep coming back to this episode. It is a good reminder to occasionally stop looking at individual problems and look at the entire replacement program as one long process.

A newborn heifer isn’t the finished product. She’s the beginning of a two-year investment.

And ultimately, the question is pretty simple: did she make it? Do you know your slippage rate?

Worth a listen

This is an older episode, but one I’ve gone back to several times over the years. Worth putting on during chores with earbuds in.