Data-driven weighing transforms Canterbury heifers
Weighing his heifer replacements regularly is as much a labour of love as it has been a valuable eye opener for Ashburton dairy farmer Andrew Whyte.
He and partner Leigh run a 980-cow dairy unit and rear 220–250 heifer replacements each year. It is a task they’ve shared from day one with their contract milkers.
“We make a point of spending considerable time rearing them as calves and doing everything we can to give them the best possible start,” says Whyte.
“Getting heifer replacement weights right is a costly and critical part of ensuring their future in the herd.
“Last year it cost us $450 a head including AI to get our animals to 100 kg.
“By the time they are in the herd, that cost is $1800 a head. That’s a significant investment. It’s too much work and money for us to lose if we can’t keep them in the milking herd.”
The job of monitoring heifer weight gains, both on farm and at the graziers, has recently been made significantly simpler on the Whytes’ farm.
Monitoring animal performance is now much easier thanks to a new partnership between Gallagher and LIC, which is making year-round decision-making more targeted and end-of-season reporting easier for dairy farmers.
They have launched a new data integration which automatically transfers farmers’ live animal weighing data from Gallagher Animal Performance software directly into MINDA, eliminating manual entry and saving farmers’ time.
MINDA is LIC’s cloud-based herd management system.
The two systems working together have helped Whyte make further progress in his steady journey to better understand the value of recording heifer liveweights and using insights from the data to grow better replacements.
He has long appreciated that assessing body condition by eye does not suffice and has been focused on monitoring heifer weight and growth data for almost a decade.
“Coming to the farm in 2015, we thought we were doing a good job with the heifers,” he says.
“We realised we could be doing a lot better. Their longevity in the herd was a struggle.”
So, at that time, he started doing some research on the impact of body weight on heifer lifespan and started weighing them.
A 2020 study by LIC, Lincoln and Massey Universities on the lifespan of 190,000 New Zealand dairy heifers reinforces his approach.¹
Studying heifer body weight and ‘stayability’ in the herd, the study found a strong positive relationship between pre-mating body weight and longevity in the herd.
Heifers that were heavier at six, 12 and 15 months of age were more likely to remain in the herd for first, second and third calvings, and more likely to calve early for their first calving.
Whyte had also learned that every percentage gain toward the 22-month liveweight target represented an additional 2 kg of milksolids in the animal’s first year of production.²
But his early efforts to log heifer weights required him to enter individual weights from the scales into a laptop Excel spreadsheet.
“Logging weights was a pretty manual process. Plus, getting the most out of the data required a bit of Excel knowledge to manage it successfully.”
Today he says the Gallagher Animal Performance integration with MINDA is a ‘game changer,’ ensuring seamless data transfer which is now much quicker to access.
“Syncing your Gallagher device yard-side enables those weights to flow into the MINDA system and gives you confidence the job is completed.
“This enables you and your grazier to have proactive conversation there and then about how the animals are doing and what actions may be required.
“It is far better to have that conversation quickly, rather than waiting until you are back home, have entered the data, and then get around to calling to talk about things – sometimes several days later.”
With the systems connected, Whyte can see how closely actual animal performance is tracking to targets.
“You can see how your animals are performing and make any necessary changes before it is too late, which is difficult to do if you don’t have the data right there in front of you.”
Changes Whyte can make for the young stock he runs at home may include drafting out a sub-group of poorer performers, removing the herd pressure on them, and giving them their own grazing area to help support their weight gain.
He believes the streamlined integration of MINDA with Gallagher Animal Performance software will encourage more farmers to weigh their young stock.
“Gallagher and LIC’s partnership and the work they have done together over the last 18 months will make farmers’ lives a lot easier when it comes to recording and managing data.”
Whyte has found he now enjoys a more positive feedback loop with some of the best graziers he deals with because he can show them how well the animals are performing.
“It is quite something to be able to say to them ‘these are the best heifers I have ever seen,’ and have the weight data to support that.”
¹ Journal of Dairy Science, May 2020 – “Body weight of dairy heifers is positively associated with reproduction and stayability.”
² Statistic shared by LIC animal performance manager Steve Forsman in 18 March 2024 Farmers Weekly article:
https://www.farmersweekly.co.nz/farm-management/weighing-in-for-genetic-gains/