In this episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions, host Scott Zehr continues the conversation with Joe Lawrence of Cornell Pro-Dairy, shifting from forage strategy to what matters most right now: return on investment.
With milk prices under pressure and input costs still elevated, the margin for error is slim. This episode explores the real economics behind forage decisions—and how small missteps can erode profitability.
Scott and Joe discuss:
Why short-term decisions often come at a long-term cost
The difference between growing tons and feeding usable tons
How forage shrink can act like someone stealing 25% of your bank account if left unmanaged
Why securing high-quality forage for lactating cows beats scrambling to replace it later
The risk of “busy” decisions that don’t deliver financial returns
This conversation redefines forage management as one of the most controllable and impactful financial levers on a dairy operation.
If you’re looking to navigate tight margins, reduce purchased feed, and make more confident decisions under pressure, this is a must-listen.
🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!
Scott Zehr: Hey, welcome everybody to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host, Scott Zehr. And today I’m again joined by Joe Lawrence from Cornell Pro Dairy. Joe, thanks for jumping back on with me. Appreciate it.
Joe Lawrence: Thanks for having me.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. So Joe, we had a great conversation a couple of weeks ago here talking about forage quality, you know, thinking from the field to feed out. And there’s a lot of ground to cover, no pun intended there, from, I try to work in jokes sometimes. But there’s a lot of ground to cover there from just remembering to master those fundamentals. Right? Cut timing, cut height, storage management, as far as, you know, keeping it in repair and keeping things clean.
And there’s so many things. And, we’re gonna be in the fields in the northeast here not too long, right? It’s, it’s probably within the next month we’re gonna see, see grass coming off and, and so on. In other parts of the country, you know, probably going on right now. But we spend a lot of time, a lot of resources, man hours to get up high quality forages. And sometimes we hit our goals of, of having elite protein that we raised here on the farm and sometimes we don’t, but we’re in kind of a down cycle in the milk price right now.
And like any business owner, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, if you know the product you’re selling is, is not valued as high. And so, cost of production is pretty much still the same or maybe slightly increasing. All this stuff. It creates pressure on the organization, on the individuals to think about decisions that are going to lessen the money going out, right? If we have less money coming in, how do we get less money coming out? And, there’s probably places on every dairy that, yeah, they could probably trim some fat here and there.
I’ve been on the professional side of this where I’ve been able to work out in the field on farms now for 13 years. And, the one thing that I’ve noticed that has stood out to me above all else, I spent a lot of time on, on the genetic side of things and dairy reproduction, and now on the front end of the cow with the mycotoxins.
The pattern that I’ve noticed is that the farms that do the best through a downswing in milk prices are the guys that don’t change anything. Right? It doesn’t matter if milk is $25, a hundred, or $16 a hundred, we need to still execute at a high level. And sure, they may trim some stuff here or there, like the fat that we don’t need during these times, but they’re not going out and slashing with a sledgehammer, right? They’re going out with a pair of scissors and trimming the fat. Not beating the program to death.
So, somebody asked me recently, Joe and I, this is, may be a long lead up to this, but somebody asked me recently there’s a, a farm that short on forage and looking at the milk pricing and, and how, how are we gonna make up this, this number in our budget, this X dollars, right?
And, I mentioned it last time, like I, I don’t have that magic wand to print cash for them. But when I looked at, and I, I was just looking at their animal health side of things. When I looked at that side of the equation, I was seeing in the data we’re probably leaving somewhere between, I’m gonna say four to eight pounds of milk on the table?
If they increased eight pounds of milk, even in the low milk prices, they actually would more than break even for the year. So, that really kind of made me think about this forage conversation with you and let’s say everything goes great this year, Joe. We have the perfect growing season, the perfect harvest season. We’ve done everything.
Well, no, we probably can’t just, you know, that that haylage isn’t gonna immediately turn into cash, but what’s the economic impact to the organization, to the dairy of not having to go source protein from the feed mill. And so that’s probably a long tee up for you. But I would like to get your thoughts on that overarching and then we’ll, we’ll break it down from there.
Joe Lawrence: Yeah, I think that’s a good example. And it, there’s a couple places I’d like to go with that. I’ll start with more like specifically to your question and then zoom back out a little bit. So yeah, it, it can be challenging to put a lot of really, capture a lot of good financials around forage quality ’cause there’s always kind of a what if component to it, of, you know, we’re not doing side-by-side trials with two different quality forages on the farm. Right?
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: But, you know, we have the dairy Farm Business Summary Program through Cornell. It’s an opportunity for farms to benchmark their financials every year against, you know, everyone else that’s in the program.
And what we see consistently and some work that some of my colleagues at pro dairy have done in analyzing the data is that, you know, if we see this trend where farms that are able to feed higher forage diets trend towards an improved income over feed cost. And so, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of other variables that go into that, right?
But we have enough years of data and also from our dairy Profit Monitor program, which is a monthly program where farms input their data. We see that where we, we can’t exactly nail down everything. But we know that there’s a solid trend, at least here in the northeast and in similar growing environments, that higher forage diets are correlated with that improved income over feed cost. Right?
And I always like to go back to a, a case study that Dr. Larry Chase at Cornell did several years ago. And this is just, again, one farm, kind of little case study. We’ll take it for what it is. But it is really fascinating to me because they, they track this farm and, when this was done, we weren’t even necessarily talking about some of the fiber digestibility metrics, the UNDF 240, the NDFD 30 hour as much as, you know, really just looking at forage NDF levels, right?
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: And so Larry shares this data where this farm going into the fall was feeding out some haylage and pretty high NDF levels in that haylage and they were hovering around 50% forage in their diet. As the fall went on, and they shifted into some different cuttings of haylage that you saw that NDF level drop. And correspondingly you saw percent forage in the diet increasing.
And so from, in the data, you know, that’s shared from October to January, percent forage in the diet went from 50% up to almost 65% forage in the diet. And through that same time period, income over feed cost went from when there was 50% diet forage in the diet, income over feed cost was $4.27 cents.
By the time we got up to about 65% forage in the diet, income over feed cost was $5.58 cents. If you just put that on a hundred cows just for easy math, it’s about $130 per day per 100 cows, right?
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: That, that you’ve, that you’ve increased income over feed cost with that increased forage in the diet. So, you know, when we can manage that, when back to our, you know previous discussion, when we can manage those things and put up that high quality feed, that’s what’s facilitating these higher forage diets, right. And through that it’s a, it’s a real opportunity to change some of those. Not completely eliminate our financial pressures right? But, but change some of the dynamics there.
Scott Zehr: How do we lessen the pressure? And there’s, that’s, I think that’s the, the goal here, right? I don’t think we’re gonna, you know, I don’t want anybody be thinking that I’m some crazy tinfoil hat guy, right? We’re not gonna just magically become profitable overnight in these downturns.
But financial I’m gonna go a little off, off topic here. The, the financial pressure in dairy farming, crop farming, dairy farming, cattle, agriculture in general leads to a lot of decision struggle. And, and there’s a reason that agriculture has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. And a lot of it is the financial pressure.
So that’s maybe the extreme on one side. But somewhere in there, like inherently, we’re probably going to consider making decisions that are gonna compromise long-term success of our operation. And then I guess from your chair, what are some of the things that are just completely non-negotiable on the forage side? Like, don’t even look here, don’t even consider it here.
Joe Lawrence: Yeah, that’s a, it’s a bit of a hard one because it’s, I, I struggle, I, I struggle with what not to include.
Scott Zehr: Well, yeah. Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: But I guess a couple things I would just say is you know, again, our goal as we talked about last episode is how many tons of this feed do we have that actually reaches the cow’s mouth, right? And that’s the right quality for her nutritional needs.
Whatever part of her lactation she’s in, or dry cow or whatever, right? So. And to do that, yeah, we, we really, can’t compromise. One thing I would say absolutely not to do, and this isn’t even financial, but we had kind of a, a droughty challenging summer here in the northeast in New York last year.
So this is even about inventory and connected to finances obviously. But, you know, one thing I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about with some farms and different groups the last month or so here is let’s not compromise quality for tonnage this spring ’cause we think we wanna, we have to rebuild inventory.
It’s not a good trade off. it’s just not a good trade off. And you may think, well, I can wait a little longer, put up extra tons, rebuild inventory ’cause I’m kind of short and, you know, I don’t have the money to buy this extra forage. And you know, what I would say to that is you really don’t have the, you can’t afford not to put up that high quality feed that allows you to achieve that higher percent forage in your ration. Right?
Because inevitably the more the yield goes up, the less pounds of that we can fit into the cow’s rumen without her filling to her physical fill limits. Right? And just not being able to eat it. So now we, we inevitably, you know, it’s kind of the cruel irony of it is we end up with excessive inventory of stuff we just can’t put as many pounds into the ration.
And we’re, we’re back to the, you know, we’re back to relying more on purchase feed ingredients to meet her nutritional needs. So I guess that would be my biggest point is both from a financial and a, considering the year we had, like in New York, is what’s not compromise that quality to try to build inventories.
Scott Zehr: And I think that might be the one non-negotiable. If, if you’re, you know, if you wanna like, just, that’s the mic drop one right there, because the idea of going out and sourcing haylage, let’s just say haylage. To some people is really kind of a nightmare, right?
You’re writing a check for it. That’s not a normal check you have to write. So it, it seems like it’s a, you know, a double whammy if you would. But the reality of what you just described is, okay, we’re gonna, opt for a little more yield this year, and I’m okay giving up a percent or two of protein.
And then what happens, right? We, what you just described. But then you’re still gonna go purchase off farm feed stuff. But it’s gonna show up in a semi with a feed most logo on it, rather than buying a high quality haylage somewhere else, or buying, you know, whatever the forage might be.
And that’s a check that we write every month no matter what. So maybe we don’t think about it quite that way. And a lot of guys do, right? I think you’re right. If there was one area, people, especially coming out of a drought year, we’re gonna try to cut corners on, if you would, that would probably be one of the places they would look.
So Joe, you know, there’s so many things on farms that we, we can’t control, right? Milk price, weather, so on. And then there’s the things we can control. We can control our decision making, we can control our management practices. And, we have to always be mindful to do a great job of mastering those things we can control. But then in, in real life. Right. What does that look like in the forage program for putting up high quality forage to, to help ease budget pressure and that stuff?
You know, where would you tell people to, to really focus on number one? Or maybe the, the second part of this question should be specifically, right? On the things they can control, but more broadly, like how do we manage those uncontrollable things?
Joe Lawrence: Yeah. I think that’s a great question. And, I think back to the kind of that classical overlapping circles. And, and I’ve actually, you know, been in farm offices where we put this up on the whiteboard or something, and I’d encourage farms to do that with their own cropping crew and or management team, right? Like put those two overlapping circles up on the whiteboard.
And one is things that are important to forage quality. And the other circle is things we can control, right? And, so where those two overlap are where we should focus the most resources in on, right? And there’s, there’s stuff that’s very important, but if we can’t control it. And if we can reference back to our previous conversation in the last episode, thinking about the, the ranking order that I referenced from Dr. Marvin Hall at Penn State of, what has the biggest impact on forage quality in the field. And you know, starting with maturity, right? So, so having that little kind of planning session with those two overlapping circles I think is helpful. And what we see in our data, and it’s a little different from corn silage to haylage. So haylage will go back to maturity tops that list, right?
Scott Zehr: Yep.
Joe Lawrence: Corn silage and especially as we look deep, dive a little deeper into fiber digestibility, and that’s really become the standard nutritionists are using to really figure out how valuable this forage is, right? And we know from years of our trials that, and other folks trials too, that, when we have a wetter growing season, if we’re on the rainier side for the growing season, we’re gonna tend to have lower fiber digestibility in that corn plant. And, you know, in a lot of the country where we’re in rain fed agriculture, we can’t control that rain.
Right? But what we can start to think about is, you know, as early as the month of August, we can start kind of looking at how rainy has the season been? What are the implications of this? Are we feeding some really good quality corn silage right now? And all of a sudden we’re looking at the current season we’re in and saying, Hey, this is gonna, the writing’s on the wall that this probably isn’t gonna feed as well as last year’s crop.
So we get to December and we have to switch over to the new crop, and it’s a bit of a wet down, right? We’re going into something more challenging, but if we, if we start thinking about that using the, the information we have in the month of August, and we start running some scenarios with our nutritionist of, all right, if fiber digestibility goes down by this much, what’s our new ration gonna look like?
And what, feed ingredients are we gonna might, we wanna source more of to that we know we’re gonna need in that new diet. It’s not gonna be a perfect scenario, right? But we can get an idea. And maybe August, September might be a lot better time to source some of those ingredients we think we might be feeding in a higher quantity, than waiting till December or January when we start feeding that new corn silage to, to make those decisions and start looking for those other ingredients we need. Right?
And, or maybe it affects our decision making for an extra cutting of our haylage later in the year that we’re really going after some quality to offset what, you know, a challenge we might have with the corn silage. So I think in the, in the bigger picture, right, that’s a, that’s a way we can use the information we have to start making some decisions that can directly impact the finances of our feeding program.
While again, recognizing that if we, we put our resources where we can have an impact and it’s important to our feeding program and we try to avoid those areas where we could buy this product, we could get this gadget. And sometimes, you know, human psychology as that makes us feel better because we did something. But it doesn’t actually mean it had a meaningful impact on our goals. So.
Scott Zehr: It’s funny you, you kind of teed up my next question where my mind was without even knowing it. But you know, sometimes when we get into these, these price challenging times, right. We’re looking to cut forage corners. Right? But it cutting corners in general, and, and right, It, it feels smart because it makes us feel good. We’re doing something to try to alleviate the pressure. But can you think of some examples to where it’s, it’s just gonna remove our optionalities later?
Joe Lawrence: Yeah. Well I think of you know, this is kind of a detailed example, but I think it’s a helpful one. We’ll use alfalfa as an example. And, you know, when we look at like the quality of alfalfa, and obviously protein’s still important in our diets, right? But as we’ve shifted our thinking more to really how much of this can we feed, how many total digestible nutrients are in this forage?
Alfalfa is a good example of where we see, like in this first cutting where we’ll get down and Dr. Jerry Cherney at Cornell’s had some interesting work where he’s collected some of this data too, is we’ll get down, you know, that alfalfa crew protein levels going down a little bit as the plant matures. Then it might get to like 18% and it just kind of plateaus off.
But if you’re actually tracking fiber digestibility, like the 30 hour NDF value at the same time points, we see where that NDFD 30 keeps going down at a pretty linear rate, even when the, when the crew protein plateau is off around 18%. You know, that’s been a change in the last 30 years or so, right? Of what metrics we’re looking at.
If we’re looking at that 18% crude protein alfalfa, and we’re thinking, well, it’s not 21, 22% anymore, but it’s still 18. That’s better than that 14% grass that’s out there, right. But there’s a big difference. And some of the work we’ve done and, Dr. Cherney collected here in New York, like there’s a big difference between 18% crude protein and May 20th and 18% crude protein on May 30th. Right. Because
Scott Zehr: Yes.
Joe Lawrence: because fiber digestibility has continued to go down in that 10 day period. And now that we have, you know, now that we can better recognize that information, to me that’s an area where we thought we were doing all right. Like, you know, we have it in the back of our mind, kind of just thinking like, alfalfa’s a little more forgiving. I can leave it out there a few more days and it’s you know, it’s still gonna be decent protein, it’s still gonna be decent feed, but, we have the knowledge now to say, well, no, wait a minute. That’s not quite right.
And, even though the protein level’s still there, the fiber, the total nutrient digestibility of this forage is gonna continue to go down and we’re not gonna be able to utilize it as well in our rations. Right. It’s just, it’s gonna be in an ingredient in our rations that’s got some constraints around how we use it. And it’s gonna force us to make other decisions about how we balance that ration because we’ve put these constraints around how we can utilize that one ingredient.
Scott Zehr: Yeah, I mean, that’s, it’s a great example of, where quality forage is buying you decision space, right? And it’s funny ’cause it’s, it’s not just decision space, but it’s also space inside the cow, right?
Joe Lawrence: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: You know, what, what we can put into where and what we can get out of that, that plant. Man, that’s, that’s, that’s big. I like the way you framed that up because it, again, and I, I think so many times these conversations, right? we know this, like we know that 18% crude protein alfalfa on May 20 is, is not the same as 18% on May 30. But yeah, I’m gonna come back to it. So often when we as humans start to feel pressure, sometimes those are the little things that we, we put on the back burner and say, okay, yeah.
But, we’re under the gun here and we need to do something else, do a different way. But I, I’m gonna come back to, Joe, the comment I made at the beginning of the episode, which is the farms that I’ve seen in the last 13 years that survive these milk price swings the best, they don’t make those decisions. They, they stick to what they know has worked even in, you know, during the high, high swings.
Joe Lawrence: Well, and I would even take that a step further. You know, kind of similar observation, just working with having the good fortune to work with a lot of different farms over the years and learn from them as, there’s also that there’s folks that I’ve seen position themselves in the downturn to take advantage of the next upcycle, right?
Scott Zehr: Yes.
Joe Lawrence: And so it’s not just about not, so there’s the immediate sacrifice of cutting something out if you’re in a downturn. But then there’s, there’s the wagging effect of that. That sometimes we make changes that have, you know, can affect an entire lactation or affect the crop we’re gonna feed for the next 12 to 15 months. And all of a sudden milk prices turn around and we’re, we’re not in a good position that our cows are at peak production to make the most of the turnaround in the milk prices, right? So it’s a kind of a double whammy.
Scott Zehr: It, it is. And the example I’m gonna give, and I, I think I’ve, I may have used this before, maybe not on this platform, but ‘09. We all remember, oh, that’s all we have to say is ‘09 in the dairy world. And we just all nod our head and smile, and thank God we’re still here.
So this one’s pretty close to home. I’ll just word it like that. Yeah, things were tight. I was on the dairy at that time. You know, I wasn’t, wasn’t an owner by any means. Didn’t have any real decision making as far as, you know, making some of the bigger strategic decisions.
But at the time, I mean, ‘09 was tough. So one of the things that got done was we started sourcing genetics from some local farms that had some, you know, great cows, right? And, they were collecting their own bulls and, yeah, $3 straws of semen sounded awesome.
Well, you know, we lived past ‘09. And in 2013 when I started at, at Select Sires I did a genetic audit on those cows. Same ones that I, I grew up working with every day. And, you know, we weren’t making a ton of milk back then. It was never a high producing herd. 62, 65 pounds was about where we had kind of maxed out for the most part.
And I could go on a list of reasons why, but, when we got into like 2012, where those genetics were coming in now, and they, they’re mature cows and they should have been just cranking. On either side of the curve we had our genetic program that we were running prior to ‘09 that we kind of went back to once milk prices came back, right? And you could see it in the genetic audit when you sorted them by milk production, sorted them by reproduction, sorted ’em by health events, didn’t matter.
That genetic decision we made in ‘09 followed for at least six years before those cows finally weeded themselves out. And you don’t make that up overnight. Right. And you can’t. I mean, you can, you can do it extreme, but it felt good at the time. But man, what a disaster it turned out to be, you know, from, from my perspective of, there’s places to cut and there’s places not to cut. Yeah. That’s just, you know.
Joe Lawrence: and I, and, and I, you know, I’m getting dangerously outta my area talking about animals here, but you know, we, we see more and more data too about the not only lifelong effects, but generational effects of stress, right? Like heat stress events even during pregnancy.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: You know pulling back, mid lactation, really pulling back the nutrition to cut cost. And it’s not just, it doesn’t just affect that animal for the rest of that lactation. Right. We there’s a, you know, I, again, I can’t speak to some of the specifics, but I just know from reading enough articles and talking to the, the people that do know that these effects are long term on, on the animals. And we, you know, we have to keep that in mind when we’re trying to, to feed through a, a tough economic period, right?
Scott Zehr: Yeah. I didn’t think epigenetics would come into this conversation, but it’s actually, I’m glad you brought that up. Because you know, you take my genetic example from my own experience, but then you, come back to, okay. Right? We’re trying to put up quality forage and we’re struggling with the milk prices. And, and you can easily see that the chain of events now that we’ve, we’ve kind of flushed it out where we’re sacrificing on the front end or we, we think we’re. You’re not sacrificing on the front end.
We think we’re compromising on the front end. But really what’s happening is, and you teased it up with the generational effect, right? Whether it’s heat stress, whether it’s mycotoxins. Whatever happens to that cow in utero affects the calf that she’s carrying and affects her developing gonads.
And if you guys wanna a reference point, if you’re a listener on here, I’ll reference people back for your listeners episodes 10, which is genetics and nutrition, the keys to Healthier Long Living Cows. That was with Dr. Kevin Ziemba. And then even more specifically, into the epigenetics realm as we just talked about, episode 11 with the man, the myth, the legend himself, Dr. Jack Britt. Talking the dairy cow fertility and the significant role of epigenetics.
And you know, these, these decisions show that we’re, we’re making today. I’m so glad you brought that up. The generational impact here is a big deal. And, you know, what, what can feel good for us today to get through a downturn, and our cash flow, I just would really encourage guys to think about the downstream effect.
And, you know, Joe, there’s a man, we’re getting a little philosophical here, but I think this is a good point. There’s a book called Mastering the Complex Sale by Jeff Toole. And, and a lot of people maybe in the sales world have read it, but what it does is it talks about the different stakeholders in the business. And how, you know, the same thing matters to stakeholders differently.
So what matters to, to maybe our herd manager you know, forage quality. Let’s take forage quality, for example. To the owner or CEO of a farm, forage quality means something different to them than it does to our herd manager, than it does to maybe the people that we have that are, are milking the cows, right.
Whether they know it or not, it does matter to all three of them. But I think a good filter to think about is, we’re making decisions around forage quality and how we’re gonna survive. Or even potentially, as you mentioned, Joe, set yourself up for capturing the, the upcycle even harder. The decision we’re trying to make today, how does it affect the company at all three levels? Right?
And are we making a decision today that makes sense for the operational stuff today, but we’re, we’re not spending any time on what’s the strategic impact of that three to five years later. What’s the tactical implications of that one to two years down the road? And so many times when there’s a fire right? To the fires today, we always focus on where the fire is instead of, just take that extra bit of time to, to flush that out and, and think about the tactical and the, the strategic.
No. Yeah, I’m, I’m glad you brought that up. So I, I guess to, to kind of get back on track here, Joe, just, just kind of bringing this conversation up. I’m gonna throw a list of, a few questions at you. What’s the most expensive, cheap decision, if you would, that you’ve seen on farms? The most expensive, cheap decision that you’ve seen?
Joe Lawrence: You challenge me to come up with another answer ’cause my go-to would be the harvest timing part of it, which I’ve already,
Scott Zehr: Yeah
Joe Lawrence: Elaborated on.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. We’ve already used that one.
Joe Lawrence: Yeah, we’ve already used that one. So I I don’t know if this is the, you know, that has the, the biggest impact in terms of money saved. But I think you know, given the prevalence of drive over piles, bunk silo, you know, our horizontal silos on farms is just cutting corners on the storage side and that, you know, there are, that does come back to do we have the enough drivers for the pack tractors that day? Do we rent an additional pack tractor and, and find a driver for it? You know, those are, in the heat of harvest and when finances are tight, those are those extra checks that have to be written, right?
But just not cutting corners there. Because again, going back to the theme of, you know, both of our visits here is if you it doesn’t matter how good a job you did growing that crop or what the forage sample results say coming out of the field if we don’t preserve that.
And shrink losses are just such a massive expense on farms, right? We’ve done some simple, we’ve done some simple math. You know, I mean if you, like, if we call around 10%, shrink a pretty good management because ferment, you know, because we have some biological losses with fermentation and stuff, right? But…
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: You know, we’ve done some, just some math on a hundred cows, just you can extrapolate that number from a hundred cows. But going from 10% shrink up to 20, 25% shrink, which unfortunately we still do see on farms. That’s essentially in our little example, you know, 10 to 12 extra acres of corn that you have to grow for every hundred cows that you’re trying to feed.
And that’s 10 to 12 acres that you have to own or rent the land, prepare the land, fertilize the land, purchase the seed for plant, control the pest, run the chopper over, haul all those loads of feed back to the bunk and they never, never reach the cow. Right?
Scott Zehr: Yeah. And it’s 10 to 12 more acres of on the backside of pitching, shoveling, loading, composting.
Joe Lawrence: Yeah. So that’s, to me it’s, I guess 10 to 12 acres depending, you know, on, on your perspective may seem like kind of the flex you have in your acreage anyways. But it’s, you know, there’s just such a cost there that could be cropped, that’s building your inventory or even in a good year could be saleable crop. Right?
And, you know, I just saw recently like some estimates on the cost of growing a corn crop this year. Putting it at close to a thousand dollars or even over a little over a thousand dollars an acre to grow a crop of corn. And that’s before you even harvest it. Right. So yeah, there’s real money there and, and real implications to how many acres you have to, to run over.
And so I guess that’s a long-winded answer to, to your question is if we’re, if we’re compromising on packing on you know, I, I like to say like, when I was first outta school, there was still a lot of discussion around like innocuous and like oxygen barrier plastics. And to me today, those aren’t discussion points or extras anymore.
They should just be part of your best management practices. They’re not gonna fix other problems, but to me in today’s world, there’s enough data behind them, there’s enough information there. They should just be part of your best management practices. And so yeah, making sure you got the enough pack tractors and starting right from the get go with doing a good job with storing that feed and not being tempted to save a few bucks on a one less pack tractor or not getting the oxygen barrier plastic this year or something would, would be where I would go with that.
Scott Zehr: I think those are excellent examples. And the shrink number, you know, people, we, we don’t necessarily see it, right? We do, but we, it shout at you, right? Mm-hmm. But let’s just, you know, let’s just say we’re a farm that’s running that 15% shrink, you know, so we’re, we’re, it is just not a great job, but we’re, we’re not doing the worst job ever, right?
I had this discussion with a nutritionist at a conference one day, and we were talking about shrink. And I said, you know, if, if at the end of harvest you could just show up with payloads and dump trucks, and you divided the pile into, you know, say four. And a crew came in during the night and took 25% of the bunk and just left.
Maybe then we could, we could get more people to, to just remember that the shrink number, it’s numbers that represents the amount of forage you put up that you’re never gonna feed to that cow. What’s the difference if it leaves in a tractor trailer at the end of harvest or if it leaves quietly over the next 12 months?
And obviously there is a difference there, but that stark contrast, I think is, something that once I got that through my head, it’s like, okay, yeah, this actually is a big deal. And, and it’s the same example. I know this is a, going back to the cow side again, but same example for that non-completion rate that we talk about in dairy. You know, if you’re sitting there running 15%, 18% non-completion rate every time, every a hundred heifer calves that are born, Hey, we’re just gonna take 15 of ’em right off the top, ’cause you’re not gonna milk them anyway. So let’s just take ’em now. Boy, if you started, you know, if we thought about it in those terms, it gets kind of scary and kind of unsettling.
Joe Lawrence: That’s a really impactful way to look at it. Yeah, that would be you know, I, I, I haven’t jumped on the AI bandwagon yet, but you’d think you could like create like a graphic for a video or PowerPoint slide where you did that, right? Like,
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: And yeah, it’s a big number. I, you know, I had a farm I was working with once, and they had some pretty challenging practices with their bunk. Will, will be nice and say it like that. But it, you know, so after at the end of harvest. I, unfortunately my camera skills weren’t the greatest. But at the end of harvest, I tried to find a reference angle with some stuff in the background, and I took a picture and then I came back four or five months later and stood in the same spot, tried to get the same angle, and took another picture. And it wasn’t perfect. I didn’t have, not, my camera skills aren’t good enough, but you could, you could clearly see, you know, the stuff in the background.
You could get a bit of an elevation and just how, how much that pile had settled. And you know, it wasn’t a super tall pile, so it wasn’t just gravity like pushing the feed down, right? It was, nutrients leaving and just burning off into the air. And I wish I could get a better reference of that sort of thing ’cause it really is impactful.
And, and another part of that that comes up is you know, and someone I respect quite a bit in the industry brings this up and I won’t, won’t take credit for it, but they you know, they talk about like, when you have leachate from your bunk, you’re not losing, that’s not pounds of just corn silage you’re losing. That’s more like pounds of corn meal you’re losing, right?
Because what’s in that leachate? It’s that it’s stuff that’s soluble in water. It’s our, you know, it’s some of that starch, it’s that sort of stuff. So that cloudy leachate that’s leaving your bunk isn’t, you can’t say that’s like x number of pounds of corn silage. You can say that’s X number of pounds of these nutrients that are actually valued at a lot higher value per ton than a ton of corn silage is valued at. Right?
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: So.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. And you know, I was thinking about that, Dr. Roth here at Agrarian Solutions, he, he likes to remind people that, you know the forage pile you put up, that is a stack of a hundred dollars bills.
Right. You know, there’s an old saying that money’s no good, or money’s like a manure pile. It’s no good unless you spread it. Well in, in terms of forage quality, it’s you know, it is no good unless you keep it tight and keep it under control. And, and actually going back to that example that I gave of the trucks coming during the middle of the night taking 25% of your bunk because of shrink.
Well, if it’s a money pile, Joe, how often would you like somebody to maybe come in once a year and take 25% of your bank account? You know, it’s just. So, you know, last question I have for you is what do resilient operations tend to protect first? You know, in the forage quality realm or so on.
Joe Lawrence: I’m gonna stick on the storage side of this and really focus effort to protect what we’ve harvested out of the field. Yeah, there’s actually, we can put some economics to this, and I don’t have the data right in front of me. But the, the farm business management and dairy management folks at Penn State a few years ago did a large statewide survey of a lot of farms that voluntarily worked with ’em to track all of their data. And you know, think of all the things on the dairy farm that can happen.
And, their summary report of that project, that the leading thing that they found separating the higher profit farms from the lower profit farms was they word it of, it was something like ability to put up high quality feeds regardless of weather, regardless of anything else going on around them. Right.
And that, that group was actually, you know, they were able to separate financial performance by some of the metrics they collected around the forage program. So I, you know, as a forage guy, that was I thought that was pretty cool, right? That gives some, lens some credibility or some emphasis to why that’s, that’s so important.
But yeah, we just, you know, again, regardless of what the weather delivers to us for a crop, what happens in the field. I think resiliency comes from doing the best job. We kind of not compromising on, on storing that feed. So.
Scott Zehr: Well, coming from the forage guy through that lens you know, I I, I would agree on the cow side from what I see is we don’t change the genetic program or we don’t change the cow care, the cow comfort side of things. We still go about it, the, you know, the right way every day, if you would. And I know it’s easy for guys like you and I to sit here and say these things and encourage guys to not succumb to the pressure and try to avoid the bad decision making traps.
But the one thing that I would say is from the one advantage that guys like you and I do have is, you know, for the last number of years we’ve been able to travel the countryside and see very different size operation, every different management style. And it’s the pattern recognition, right? It’s, this is, whether you’re a, a producer in Florida, California, the Midwest, New York, Maine. There’s certain truths that are consistent across all sizes, shapes and management practices of dairy.
And I, I think the, the one you just mentioned is one of ’em. And then the cow side, right? That’s, those are the things that we really gotta remember not to try, not to end up compromising when we’re faced with decision pressure. So yeah, I thought that was great insight from you, Joe. Well with that, Joe, I’ll, I’ll ask you do you have any final parting words for our audience before we call it a day?
Joe Lawrence: I think I might go back to something we started last episode on, is just we’re coming into a busy part of the year and you know, at the end of the day, we’ll, we wanna do all this stuff, right? And that creates a lot of strain.
But if, you know, let’s take the steps to, to do it safely and take care of our ourselves first, right? Like I think it, becoming more acceptable to acknowledge the fact that if we don’t take care of ourselves, then we’re not gonna be able to do a good job at these other goals we have. So.
Scott Zehr: I’ve been preaching that to myself and, and to anybody that’ll listen for the last number of years. ‘Cause yeah, you don’t take care of yourself, how are you gonna take care of others? And I, I used to think that was selfish. But I actually think that’s extremely selfless. Once you understand it. So
Joe Lawrence: I would agree.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. Well, great talking to you Joe from all the way on the other side of the county line. And hopefully we have another visit soon. And with that folks appreciate you taking time. And make sure if you found value in today’s podcast, you hit that share button and send it to somebody that could use the conversation. With that, we’ll be talking to everybody again in a couple of weeks. Thank you.
