Enjoy entering data in DelPro.

Cow calendar:  It is wise to enter cow data such as heats, insemination, drying off and calving into DelPro every day.

DelPro returns much more interesting data and lists when you are “up to date”.

Treatments: Entering all treatments, including the correct teat or leg, provides an overview of what has already been done to this cow, but also provides complete lists of what has been done to all cows over a period, an annual overview for example, and which products/medicines have been used.

Excluding from ration calculation:  Despite the fact that very nice feed tables are used, you still have to exclude some cows for a reason, usually temporarily. Checking this and being able to find it in a list helps the cow to become healthy again and us not to forget to turn it off again.

Intending to sell:  When you know that a cow is in her last year and for example should not be inseminated anymore, it is good to indicate this in DelPro. This also makes the lists with the cow calendar events much cleaner and therefore more clear.

And with a DeLaval V310, DelPro also knows immediately that this cow no longer needs to be sampled for progesterone and that saves sticks => costs!

Note: A computer cannot think of anything itself but can remember very well.
So let the farmer do the thinking and the computer do the remembering !

Replacement percentage.

On farms we encounter replacement percentages of 50% to less than 20%. This concerns heifers that are needed for annual replacement in the herd.

During presentations I often show the list below. How, in my estimation, does the living environment influence this economically very interesting figure.

Suppose you have 100 dairy cows,
how big do I estimate the influence on the replacement percentage to be? :

1. A good selection / straw pen after VMS:                             2 –  5  cows
2. Comfortable cubicles with nice bedding:                             5 – 10 cows
3. Claw care prior to drying off:                                               5 – 10 cows
4. Safe, dry, walking paths with good grip:                              2 –  5  cows
5. Dry cows and heavily pregnant heifers
   having plenty of room to move:                                           2 –  5  cows
6. Extra structure and condition maintenance for dry cows:    5 – 10 cows
7. 2-Minute-Check at each round of the barn:                         5 – 10 cows
8. ………………………

The better the conditions are in order, the lower the rearing costs you have, the easier the cows walk and produce and the more space you have to select in the bottom of the herd.

Fertility does not appear in such an overview, but resistance does ….!

Dear reader,

To make searching easier you can read the Tips per category on these pages.

So for information about, for example, udder health or concentrate supply, you can find which Tips have been written about this per category since 2010.

There are Tips that are old and Tips that fit into multiple categories.

The latest published Tips can still be found below and on the right side.
On the phone you will find the categories on this page under the last 5 Tips.

– Click here for Tips in categories –

Automatic Milk Permission.

This is not the first time that we have Tippen about the automatic milk permission.

Since DelPro update 10.x, the possibilities have been expanded again, hence this Tip.

We used to have 3 possibilities, for the newly milked cows, for the cows that are further in lactation and for the cows that almost have to be dried off.
Then in the first period the hours after the last milking and in the second period the expected milk yield were leading for permission for the next milking.

This has been expanded to 5 possibilities, and in this way we can make the milk permission even more gradual.

We still give the cows permission again in the first period, the first 50 – 60 days after calving, from 5 hours after the last milking. But afterwards, depending on milk production and occupancy on the robots, the permission for hours after the last milking can be increased more gradually. But those hours still need to be increased, for example in the first period to 5 hours but second period to 7 or 8 and third period to 8 or 9. The penultimate period to 9 or 10 and for drying off the hours to 11.

We leave the expected milk yield almost the same, for heifers to 8 or 9 litres and older cows to 9, 10 or 11 litres, depending on the daily production of your cows and the occupancy on the robots.

All this with the aim of distributing the available milkings per day, at most companies between 150 and 200 milkings, as efficiently as possible. And for the individual cow it also applies: both too often and too few milkings per day are not good for the udder health.

We only lower these settings in the first weeks after you have started with the robot(s) and sometimes for a short period if the cows are not coming well.
But especially the latter must be solved differently!