What if the biggest hidden cost on your dairy isn’t feed, labor, or genetics, but the pain of not changing?
In this episode of Ruminate This, Scott Zehr and co-host Jeff Hostetter, Product Manager at Premier Select Sires, explore the challenges and opportunities facing today’s dairy producers. Change in dairy management can feel disruptive with new training, updated protocols, and added investments. But staying the same carries a constant, quiet cost in lost milk production, reproductive failures, high culling rates, and wasted resources.
You’ll learn how forward-thinking farms push past “good enough” and capture more profit by:
Supporting cow longevity and keeping “Golden Girls” in 4th and 5th lactation productive, the most profitable animals in the herd.
Recognizing the true ceiling of herd performance and avoiding the trap of underestimating potential.
Making smart, long-term investments in transition cow management, calf health, and silage protection that deliver a powerful ROI.
Building trust with dairy nutritionists and consultants who prioritize the farm’s interests and make change easier.
Every dairy pays for pain. The choice is whether to take on the short-term discomfort of change for long-term herd health and profitability, or keep paying forever through hidden losses, high turnover, and missed opportunities. The pain of change is temporary. The pain of staying the same is permanent.
🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!
Scott Zehr
Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host, Scott Zehr. And today we’re gonna talk about pain. That’s right. Pain. The pain of change versus the pain of staying the same. Every farm I walk onto tells kind of the same story without ever saying a word.
I can see it in the numbers.You often see it in the cows, and you can see it in the look on the manager’s face. They know something’s broken. Maybe it’s fresh cow crashes. Maybe repro is stuck in neutral. Maybe it’s a ration that doesn’t pencil out anymore, even though it looks great on paper. But here’s the thing, nobody wants to admit: bad choices hurt.
The difference is, which pain are you willing to pay for? Are you willing to invest in pain or would you rather pay for pain? The pain of change is sharp. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s immediate. You have to retrain employees, rewrite protocols, and take a hard look at what you’ve been coasting on.
It stinks. But the pain of staying the same, that’s the slow bleed. It’s the milk you never ship. It’s the cows that never breed back. It’s the forage you never get to feed. And ultimately, the prophets that never show up. It doesn’t scream at you, it just robs you quietly. So today we’re gonna break this down.
The pain of change versus the pain of staying the same. And why the smartest producers I know choose to suffer now so they can win later. This isn’t theory, it’s real life. So let’s ruminate on this. And with that today, my co-host for the day is none other than my friend Jeff Hostetter, who’s gonna ruminate on this topic with me.
You know, Jeff, you and I get to work together quite a bit. Oftentimes when we get pulled onto a farm, it’s not because everything’s going great. But oftentimes we’re the ones that do embrace that role of being the agent of change. Jeff, you are the product manager for Premier Select Sires. You’ve been in sales now for, I think you said 25 ish years.
Jeff Hostetter
That’s correct.
Scott Zehr
You’ve had to, in 25 years, run across a farm where they just couldn’t change. The pain of staying the same was still not as great as the pain of change in their mind. And if you haven’t let me know, but if you have, the question I have for you is what happens to those folks that just can’t fathom the pain of change?
Jeff Hostetter
Well, I think you were incorrect, Scott, you said, I’ve run across a farm that wouldn’t change. I’ve run across many, many, many farms that were definitely resistant to change. And it’s human nature. The pain of what you know versus the pain of the unknown. And there’s a certain amount of fear in that unknown. But you know, as you say that question, I, I can’t think of a specific farm back in my previous, work as a nutritional consultant where, really friendly, good relationship that I had with this dairy producer. And it was, it was a relatively small farm, just a couple hundred cows in southern Pennsylvania.
But, I was not working with them at the time as far as doing their nutrition work. But I had stopped a few times and made a few management suggestions and they were so, I guess they were jaded by the fact that there had been people in there in the past that had made promises that were not kept. So they, they’d almost become, distrusting of folks that, that stopped on the farm.
But I did end up making a suggestion as far as water availability coming out of the parlor. And, they did find a way to implement that , and saw some positive change. And, eventually I was able to, to work with them and had a good working relationship for several years after that.
You know, I do think that each situation’s different and people don’t always know that they’re in pain. They may not see the pain, or feel the pain necessarily, or they may have just become callous to the pain. And or they’ve tried to, to make a change in the past and they just, it didn’t work. Or they were given bad advice or someone was just, you know, trying to sell them something that wasn’t gonna give them a return on their investment.
Scott Zehr
They were self-serving rather than customer serving, right?
Jeff Hostetter
Yes. And unfortunately, there’s still folks like that around.
Scott Zehr:
There is, and I, I think, you know, guys like ourselves, many people in the professional space that are serving, you know, dairy and beef. We certainly pay for the sins of the past. And sometimes those sins are just people, right? People that are out there with their own agenda rather than the customer’s agenda. I like what you said though, the fear of the unknown. Right. And I, and I think, I think psychologically, I think that’s a big part of people’s resistance to change.
But then like, tactical, right? I mean, it hurts. Like if we have to implement new protocols. Now we have to retrain our employees. I mean, stuff like that leads to chaos. Very few times are we going to be able to just, Hey, here’s the new protocol. Here’s how you implement it and go.
And there’s never a hiccup, there’s a learning curve. Right? Because it has to become a habit. And that’s, it’s costly. There’s no doubt about it. You know, think about things like adopting a new transition cow program. We’re making changes. We’re expecting people to carry out those changes and what if they don’t? Right. I wonder, I guess my hope is that we can challenge somebody listening to think of this pain as something you can either choose to invest in or something that’s, it’s, it’s going to cost. Right? I love that term, like the milk you didn’t ship.
Because, Jeff, how many times have you walked onto a farm and, how are the cows doing? Like how’s production? Oh, we’re making 85, 88 pounds of milk. You know? They’re satisfied with that. And you look at maybe the setup, the management potential, the feed quality, you know, stuff. And you know that there’s contemporaries out there making 95 pounds of milk, a hundred pounds of milk. Making seven plus pounds of components.
But yeah, this guy’s satisfied at 85. And I think you can always have that discussion of, you know, cost of you know, gaining that extra milk, but, boy, why are we so complacent? It seems like. I mean, so, so many farms, like Yeah, we, we hit 88 pounds of milk. We’ve been there for three years.
Why is good enough all of a sudden becoming good enough? And of course I’m painting a broad brush. It’s not the way it is on every farm, but those aren’t the people I’m trying to reach right now.
Jeff Hostetter
Yeah. I think, it’s, like complacency and people just don’t know what their ceiling is for that particular operation. They just, they don’t know their ceiling. They think, you know, especially if they’ve made progress through the years, through the decades. And they see how far they’ve come and they may kind of hit a, like you said, where they reach a certain plateau for two or three years and think, okay, this, this must be the limiting spot of where this operation with these facilities and these genetics and these people. 85 pounds, let’s just say.
And they, they might not know their ceiling or they might not even understand what, what’s the weakest link? What is the weak link in their operation to just take ’em to the next level. And I think there’s less folks that are complacent than there were five or 10 years ago because, you know you’ve gotta keep pushing and being aggressive and looking for that next, to reach that next level in this industry. It’s just such a competitive industry. And, it doesn’t mean that you jump at every, every product or every, everything that becomes available. You do your research, you investigate.
But, the folks that are the most successful, I think, really don’t believe in a ceiling. They believe that anything’s possible and they’re willing to put the work in, to make that happen and to, and to see what tools they can utilize to make that happen.
Scott Zehr
Well, I remember back in my previous life with, with Premier, I was on a dairy, one of the first breeding customers that I ever picked up. I said to the owner, I said, so what’s, what’s your goals here? Like, what’s your production goal? What’s your repro goal? You know, and I’m, I’m waiting for the numbers, right? I’m waiting for 95 pounds of milk. I’m waiting for 50% per service conception rate. And it was really funny. He, he said, I don’t believe in goals.
It’s like, okay, tell me more about this. He said, I think the problem with goals is that, okay, let’s just say I set a goal of a hundred pounds of milk. Well, if I can go from, you know, my dad in 1960, making 70 pounds of milk to a hundred pounds of milk in, you know, 2015, should that be my goal? Like, is that the right goal?
Like should that goal be 110 pounds of milk? Should you know what he goes, why would you put a limitation on how, how high you can go? And so I, I think that’s an interesting point you just made. I don’t think a lot of farms truly understand their ceiling. Or maybe the right way of saying that is they think there’s a ceiling that doesn’t exist.
Jeff Hostetter
Hmm.
Scott Zehr
Are we seeing that right now with reproduction success? And this is kind of a side note here, but man, if I go back 10 years ago, Jeff, and you know, preaching 50% of your herd pregnant on first service is what I used to challenge clients to do. And now we’re seeing 60. And I mean, if, if we’d have kept the mindset that 50% is as good as you’re ever gonna do and nobody’s willing to challenge it, I mean, what if? What if he can get 90%?
And I think we’ve, I brought that up here before with Dr. Roth and John Lawler, on an episode that we did together. I like what you said on not understanding their weakest link. You know, I mean, it’s a similar analogy, right? We’ve used this probably a million times in my life. But the guy that manages the dry cow program probably isn’t gonna be the first one that notices the cows are too fat or too thin, right? Too close to the situation.
But then when somebody like yourself, it does have that opportunity to point out that weakest link. And figuring out ways of doing that thing better, whatever that thing might be. Sometimes they still don’t wanna recognize it. Right? And, you know, maybe some of it is fear of the unknown, like you said. But, I heard this somewhere, change stings because it shines a spotlight on the habits we’d rather not admit we need to break. Yeah.
Jeff Hostetter
Ouch.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. You know. And, It just, you know, kind of makes you, kind of, makes you think about that in a different light. But, you know, with change, right? There’s this upfront hurt. We talked about it with retraining employees. We talked about it with establishing new protocols and, obviously, sometimes there’s an initial monetary investment, some capital. So let’s, let’s flip the script and go the other way.
So staying the same. Boy, there’s a lot of hurt there that can last a long time. So what are some Jeff, just some practical examples, like staying the same on that mindset of staying the same, hurts forever or hurts for longer, anyway. Give us some examples of things you’ve seen on herds over the years where just, the status quo has become acceptable.
Jeff Hostetter
Yeah. Yeah, I think, and this is kind of fresh in my mind. recently got to hear Dr. Gavin Staley with Diamond V, talk about the golden girls. Those cows fourth, fifth lactation or more that, they’ve paid for school, they paid their raising costs, and they’re just very profitable.
And, i’m thinking of a herd that we did a, one of our folks at Premier did a repro analysis and they had a very high percentage of two year olds in the herd, first lactation. And, they were good with it. They liked it that way. They had a very high call rate. I think it was upwards over 40%. But in their mind, they were bringing, you know, those new genetics constantly into the herd. And, their milk was okay. It was, it was low nineties.
But, they had gotten used to that and they just had that mindset. Like an older cow is nothing but problems. And it, it was a whole mindset shift to just get them to consider, you know, if we make a change, if we do some things to maybe support those older cows through the transition, could we avoid some of those early, you know, first 60 day calls on those older cows and bring down that call rate a little bit. And therefore, you know, maybe we don’t need to raise quite as many heifers.
Maybe we could, you know, raise a few more beef on dairy and help cash flow, that kind of thing. So It was just, part of it was like this, the story that they were telling themselves. And we all do this. We tell ourselves stories in our own mind that you’re doing something because you like it. But when you really dig down and figure out the economics behind it, the profitability behind it, there might be ways to do it better.
We just have to encourage people that we work with to be open to look at those things. And I think part of our job as consultants or people that work with producers is to make it easier for them to make changes like, you know, everyone’s busy. Producers are busy, they’ve got things on their mind.
They might be thinking about future expansion or you know, how do I, how do I pay my bills? Or just, they’ve got a lot on their mind. Can we facilitate a protocol change by, you know, typing up a protocol, translate it to Spanish if needed, like anything we can do to make their life or make a change less, less painful upfront. I think we need to make sure that we’re doing our part as well.
Scott Zehr
Well, I think that’s a great point. I like that you went there with the call rate deal because that’s, oh yeah. I think that’s one of those things that, you know, obviously we, we see a shift, across there in the US where we do want these golden girls. We want more of ’em. And I’m just gonna pick on, you know, that comment about, they were excited to be bringing in all these new genetics.
Jeff Hostetter
Yeah.
Scott Zehr
What is the point of bringing in all these new genetics if they’re gonna be out of the herd in 2.1 lactations? I mean.
Jeff Hostetter
The other point is, with that, people in the past have used the 3 0 5 ME number, the 3 0 5 me lactation number.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Jeff Hostetter
You don’t get paid for me. You get paid for milk in the tank.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Jeff Hostetter
I think we’ve overemphasized that at times.
Scott Zehr
I would agree. I, I love it even more when people wanna make breeding decisions on 3 0 5 me. Like, I love it. anyway, that’s not for this one, but, you know. And I guess, you know, just trying to think about this pain, it’s almost like pain management, right? but you know, if, if you’re listening to this episode or you’re, you’re listening to it and it’s applicable. Or you’re listening to it and you think you’re, you know, maybe you’re a consultant, you have a farm in mind.
You know, I’m, I’m thinking about that herd that, 15% non-completion is, is what it is. We don’t really treat a lot of days, but we do seem to have a lot of fresh cows that just don’t take off all that fast, right? It’s, it’s these quiet things. And my favorite one, my favorite one.
Now Jeff, now that I’m more on the feed end of stuff with agrarian is wasted feed. I really liked the way Dr. Roth put it in an episode, I think it was our corn silage episode. I’m putting up good corn silage, probably episode 52. Yes, episode 52. I had to check myself. But imagine, imagine the corn pile being a pile of a hundred dollars bills. Every time you take a bucket of feed out of there and go dump it in your, in your compost pile, you’re dumping money.
Eh. But yet there’s a lot of resistance. And again, it’s not everybody. But I can, I can drive four miles from my house to a multi-generational, 2000 cow dairy that, you know, they’ve been around a long time. They’ve obviously done something right. But what are they having to do? Like where else are they having to give up because they literally won’t put plastic on their corn bunk?
So like, imagine the money you’d have left over if you just saved, you know, 10% of your corn, 15% of your corn. In a year like this year at least crops around here, corn silage is gonna be very valuable. Cause we don’t have, right now, we do not have a lot of great corn silage out there. So, you know, this episode, if you’re listening is, is airing in October.
We’re recording this middle of September right now, and corn chopping is going on. And Jeff, it looks rough out there. But the wasted feed thing, I think is a big one that we probably need to look at. And I think that’s a good example of that, that quiet, robbing of profits that we just don’t see. Right? It’s not a bill we have to pay. So Jeff, when I say that, I think smart producers choose which pain they pay for, what do you hear when I say that?
Jeff Hostetter
Smart producers, they choose the pain. Yeah. They’re proactive. They change before they’re forced to because they may look at a small problem. Let’s say their somatic cell count’s a little high. Maybe it’s 180 and they would like to see it less than that. And they’re willing to, they understand that that is even 180 is, is costing them, whether it’s premiums or lost milk or, more mastitis incidents.
But if they can figure out a way to lower that before there’s a problem, before there’s a huge uptick in mastitis through a heat wave. It’s gonna help them. and they may have to spend some money. They may go through some pain. They may need to call some cows, in the beginning, which is a cost they wouldn’t have had but in the long run, they’re gonna be much, much further ahead financially and health wise in their herd if they do something like that.
Scott Zehr
Playing the long game, right?
Jeff Hostetter
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ’cause most, most dairy producers aren’t here to milk cows for two years and then sell the herd and come back in. It might get few, but yeah, we’re, we’re in it for the long haul. We’re in it for the long haul.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, it’s interesting you think about some of the decision making that goes on, and, some of the smartest producers I’ve ever been around, you know, when we’re having these types of discussions, whether it’s on cell count, whether it’s on anything really, they, it’s, it’s almost like and you can see it on their face, right? They’re just kind of like thinking about this from a 10,000 foot view. Like what does this decision today mean five years from now? What does it mean 10 years from now? Right?
And it’s not just making decisions to put out fires. And I think if, I think if that’s the position that you currently find yourself in as a producer, like email us [email protected] and you know, let’s, let’s talk. Because that’s not, that’s not a recipe for success. I mean, that’s, that’s painful being in that mode, when you’re reactionary problem solving and gosh, it, you know, seems like everything’s going wrong, right? You’re making these decisions.
And, hey, I’m gonna be the first one to tell you I don’t have a dairy farm, but I am in farming with Maple. Guess what happened to me this weekend, Jeff? I am, I had a project that I needed to use my skidsteer for, and my skidsteer wouldn’t start. Well, the starter was bad. Well, I knew that there’s been a bad spot in the starter for a year and a half. But then when I needed the skid steer the most, the starter decided to just call it quits.
Jeff Hostetter
Mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr
That wasn’t very strategic on my part. Right? To make matters worse? Okay. I’ll just go use the tractor. And because I needed the loader. I bought a set of tires for that tractor three years ago for the front.
And said, Hey, when, ’cause one, they were both getting bad, but I mean, we’re not using this tractor a ton, but it was on the agenda to get it done this year. So I, I walk over to the bar and I jump on the tractor. Guess what? That tire gave out from the day before. Now the tractor’s on three wheels.
I have no skid steer. I have no tractor. Right? And so, yeah, the mindset behind that of, you know, just, it was stressful. Just like, you know, oh, poor me, everything went wrong the same time. To your point that, you know? The guys that think 10 steps ahead, all that would’ve been avoided. And it happens to all of us like it, it definitely does, but.
Jeff Hostetter
It takes time to, to examine yourself or examine your operation and say, what are those things that are drip, drip, dripping away at my profits or my profitability? I’ve actually started asking folks on farm visits, you know, what’s, what is your greatest point of pain right now? And they’ll usually say, oh, it’s, labor. Or, or milk price is too low, you know, just kind of off the top of the head.
But I, I do encourage people like, take some time and just think, take time with your account and look over what are those areas where you feel like there’s opportunity, opportunity for growth. It doesn’t always jump out and bite you. And sometimes you like, like with the tires or the skid loader, you know, it’s there. You’re just like it. We’ll get around to it. It’s, it works for now.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Hostetter
But it takes time to, to figure out those things.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. We talk a lot in, especially here at Agrarian, right? Every company that sells a product, we talk about ROI. I think from this, this pain discussion, one of the things I wanna, I wanna challenge listeners with, and I’d like your, your take on this, Jeff, is what’s the ROI of a few weeks of pain or maybe even a couple months of pain if it means better calvings? If it means better repro? If it means more milk? If it means happier people? Which is gonna turn into stronger margins down the road. What’s the ROI on that versus what you’re doing now?
Jeff Hostetter
Yeah, it’s like looking behind the, the surface. For example, for calves, if you’re, we sell a product called Convert Gel. It’s an antibody product that you give to every calf at birth. And there’s a cost to that. Depends what package, but, you know, maybe seven or eight bucks a calf.
And what’s the return on that investment? There’s the obvious, okay. If less calves die or get sick, that’s where your money comes back. But there’s so many hidden costs to that. There’s, the labor to treat calves. There is the lost gain, there is okay, we, we all know if an, if an animal, if a calf is sick couple times while it’s young, it’s not gonna produce as an adult.
I mean, when you’re talking to ROI, I do think calves and, and young heifers is, there’s a huge return on, on investment. And it, yeah, we, we start with, with what they’re worth from the day they, from the minute they hit the ground, they’re more valuable than ever. Yeah, it’s, there are just so many hidden costs in that. And that, little bit of quote unquote pain of just boosting their immune system and, and fortifying, their health from day one. There’s multiple streams of return. Some we don’t even realize.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. I think that’s a great point. And along those same lines, I’ll share this. One of the smartest things I ever heard a producer say about our DTX product. So think epigenetics, right? We’ve all seen, if you haven’t, it’s out there research showing that, a pregnant cow through about a heat stress. I mean, which is basically inflammation. Like the cow’s affected, the offspring’s affected, that’s in utero. And the developing goads of that offspring are also affected.
It’s affecting three generations simultaneously. The same thing should carry over to a mycotoxin challenge, right? It’s an event, an inflammation event that that’s happening to that dry cow and, you know, and when I encouraged the producer to include the dry cows on DTX to give them coverage from the high DON and high Zearalanone in that herd, immediately met with, yes, that is a great idea.
Because we need to be thinking about the cows that we wanna milk three, five years down the road. Like that’s on their radar. I thought that was a great, just a great perspective on that. ‘Cause yeah, I mean, how many herds do we run across cow’s not making milk right now, whether she’s a, you know, prepubescent heifer, whether she’s a bread heifer, if she’s never capped or she’s dry, they don’t matter. They’re not making milk right now.
Jeff Hostetter
Yeah.
Scott Zehr
You know, and, and again, it can be painful to, to have to re you know, retrain our brains to think about that stuff. But I, I would challenge folks to, to consider that. I mean, I, I come back to every farm is gonna pay for pain. Which pain would you rather pay for?
The kind you pay once or the kind that just takes money away from you day after day, day after day. Jeff, as we wrap up, I’d like to give you a chance here, just what’s a, from your perspective, 25 years experience and, and working with, with dairy farms, in a couple different ways. You know, what are two or three things that you really wanna send home with the audience today?
Jeff Hostetter
You know, I would just encourage producers to, to not be risk averse. In everything, everything you try, there’s risk, every change you make, there’s risk, like we said before, fear of the unknown. But, I would encourage producers to figure out who they trust, who’s demonstrated and earned that trust.
And then when they trust those folks, don’t be afraid to, to try things that could, put a, a plug in those ongoing drips of pain and fix, fix it permanently. Like permanent fixes to, to issues. We can’t fix everything with a, with a teaspoon of this or a product.
There may be facility changes that are needed and that may require creativity and that kind of thing. But I think, just, Don’t be afraid to, to try things, see how they work on your operation. What’s the worst thing that could happen? You know, you could spend a little bit of money on, on something and it, you didn’t see the response on your herd.
But it’s not trying is is like, I just feel like you’re shooting yourself in the foot by by not trying something just ’cause it’s, things are pretty good. Things are pretty good. So that, I think that’s the biggest thing I’ve, I’ve seen. Just finding people you trust and then, don’t be afraid to, to try things that, that put yourself out there that have a little bit of cost, a time investment, you know, a resource investment and trust those people that you work with to, to help you work through those things.
Scott Zehr
Wow. I think that’s great advice. And you know, from my perspective, I’ll, I guess kind of the same thing. I’m, I’ll echo what Jeff said and if you’re listening to this episode, and I, I don’t know, like this, this is something that I, I really think, an episode that I think people can, can take to, cause that, again, at the end of the day every farm is gonna pay for pain.
And it really, the only choice you have is which bill you’re willing to pay. You can pay that sharp upfront cost of change, the discomfort of retraining, rewriting, and rethinking. Or you can keep paying the slow, invisible tax of staying the same. You know, going back to that, the milk that never ships, the cows that never breed back, the feed we never feed.
And you know, I, I think the smart producers, Jeff, they don’t avoid pain. Right? They choose the pain that buys in the better future. Yeah. The pain of change folks is temporary. But to Jeff’s point, the, the pain of staying the same is it can be permanent. So yeah, I would like to just challenge the listeners out there.
If you’re a consultant, if you’re a producer, if you’re a consultant, thinking about a producer, now’s the time. Now’s the time. So, folks, I appreciate you tuning into another episode of Ruminate This. Jeff, good to talk to you as always, buddy. And we’ll be talking again soon. And everybody else, see you in two weeks.
