The 150-head self-replacing commercial milking herd at Ellinbank SmartFarm is used for research to advance the Victorian dairy industry.
Photo by
Jeanette Severs
The Ellinbank SmartFarm, in Gippsland and co-funded by industry and the Victorian Government, is aiming to improve its pasture-based grazing system and herd management to produce more high-productivity cows.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
Professor Joe Jacobs is research director at Ellinbank and recently addressed a group of farmers at the research farm at Ellinbank.
The 230 hectare farm hosts a 150-head self-replacing commercial milking herd, that is also utilised for animal health and pasture research purposes.
Until recently, calves and heifers were agisted off-farm.
These younger animals have moved back to the research farm and need to be grazed, even though there is pressure on the paddock and fodder system from ongoing drought conditions.
“It meant we brought 240 head back to Ellinbank,” Joe said.
“We run the research farm as a commercial enterprise.
“Increasing the stocking rate in these conditions and at the start of winter has presented some challenges.”
Professor Joe Jacobs is leading a research project at Ellinbank SmartFarm to produce more high productivity cows, milking 100,000 litres over their lifetimes.
Photo by
Jeanette Severs
The farm is predominantly perennial rye-grass based, but pasture trials in recent years are ongoing to determine if a more diversified plant system will improve stocking rate without adversely affecting production.
“One of the questions we want to answer is, can we achieve 100,000 litre cows in a grazing-based system?” Joe said.
“A cow that produces 10,000 litres a year, for 10 years of productivity.
“Generally, there’s a few of these cows in the herd, but they’re a minority in the herd.
“Genetically the animals can do it.
“We ask ourselves, can we provide the right feed to them and keep them in the herd long enough.”
Joe said the average milking cow was in peak performance herds for four years.
“I think that figure is around the national average,” he said.
“So there is a fair bit to go to get cows to 10 lactations and get those sort of numbers.”
A project at the Ellinbank farm titled Lifetime Performance aims to answer the question by recording data about an animal from birth to when it ceases to be productive.
Joe said early intervention to health and structural problems could keep the animals in the herd and productive.
“There’s good data that says 30 per cent of the cows you reared through to mated heifers don’t make it to their second lactation,” he said.
“We want to understand why and identify the issues that affect that scenario.”
Some of the issues may be around which cows return first from the dairy to fresh pasture, and how that can be managed at the dairy.
“We’ve got some good data from here and from commercial farms that shows every hour it takes animals to get back to the paddock after those first cows, is costing 1.5 litres per cow,” Joe said.
“We’ve done studies where we flipped the milking order around that show the same 1.5 litres difference.”
Joe said it indicated the time it took to return to pasture impacted on some cows’ productivity.
Other data was being collated about the effects of manipulating the grain composition to suit the pasture eaten by those cows.
