Milk Recording as a Decision Support System for the Commercial Farmer – Ireland Developments.

To grow milk recording in Ireland we had to make it more attractive to commercial dairy farmers. We employed a two pronged approach to address the gap in milk recording uptake, a) increasing the benefits and b) reducing the effort of recording (inconvenience and cost factors). After running trials in 2004 and 2005, the Tru Test electronic DIY milk recording was offered as a service option to all dairy farmers in 2006. This has taken out a lot of the inconvenience and reduced the cost of recording when compared to the recorder based model. We complimented these new service options with new reports that were more “action” based, designed to make milk recording more of a decision support system for the commercial farmer. We also ran an education programme to fully explain our profit based Economic Breeding Index (EBI) so farmers could maximise the benefit from their data. By March 2006 we had 1,000 herds signed up to the new system of which 40% are new to recording. By the end of 2006 we expect these Electronic cells to reach 1,400 herds on the new DIY service. Using the same ratio for new herds (40%) we would expect this to translate to approx 35,000 cows new to recording in 2006. ICBF and the Irish service providers see this electronic DIY service as the main mechanism to reach our 5 year goal of 600,000 cows recording by 2011.

 

Introduction

Ireland has only 33% of its dairy cows in milk recording.Countries like New Zealand, Holland and Denmark have in the region of 75% - 92% of dairy cows in milk recording. http://www.waap.it/enquiry/.These countries are the main exporters of semen on the world market. ICBF’s mission is to bridge this gap in Milk Recording take up, so Ireland can compete and be an exporter rather than an importer of dairy genetics. Too long milk recording has been perceived as the “preserve” of the pedigree breeder – we needed to widen the scope to include commercial entities. Commercial farmers, like anyone else running a business, will only pay for a service if the perceived benefit outweighs the effort (for effort in this case read cost and inconvenience). To grow milk recording in Ireland we needed to address both sides of the equation – so we endeavoured to increase the benefits and at the same time come up with service options that reduced the effort in milk recording.

 

 

Increasing Benefit

Reducing Effort (reducing costs)

Tru Test electronic automated milk recording system