Jordan Hunt

I want to provide a brief update on what our team is seeing with new crop corn silage across different regions. The one common complaint has been silage collapses/avalanches that result in days’ worth of feed falling from the silage face. as well as a mycotoxin update. Mycotoxins are commonly looked to if we are experiencing abnormal cow health and/or repro performance on herd. Somewhat like an avalanche in the sense that things unravel a bit, you want to get ahead of it before much bigger issues arise. Read more to get the entire update.

Fall is a great time of year. Football is in full swing; harvest is wrapping up and the social media influencers can take selfies with their pumpkin spice lattes and colorful trees. Besides all these great things, there is that thing looming ahead of us: Old Man Winter. Rather than blog about how depressing winter can be though, I want to put attention on what can be proactively done now around your feed center to help make Old Man Winter’s ‘fun’ less challenging.

How do we incorporate plans around ensuring a clean harvest? In this week’s GPS Dairy vlog, Jordan defines “clean feed”, potential contaminants and how to avoid contamination during the growing season and harvest.

It’s the time of year where the question begins to surface, “Am I going to have enough corn silage to make it to harvest?” or “When do you think we will harvest 1^st crop hay and will my existing inventory carry me to that point?” If you have a good forage budget and tracking method for feed-out, then these questions can be answered with ease. However, if your dairy team begins to squirm at the thought of these questions then we need to have a talk and get organized around your forage inventory. Having a good forage budget doesn’t need to be complicated.

Happy New Year everyone! New year resolutions are a great way to reinvigorate yourself and your team to hit goals for the coming year. Sadly though, we often have great intentions with resolutions but fall short because they are not feasible, we lose interest or simply forget about them. The key is to set obtainable resolutions that create quick wins and build momentum to where you end up doing more than initially planned. Let’s review what some good feeding software New Year resolutions could look like:

For today, I want you sit back and review the current state of your feeding center. The goal of FeedFIT is to provide the framework and resources to understand the financials, trace the inventories and track the KPI’s of the feed center. Think of it similarly to what we have done with our milking parlors. There are clearly defined KPI’s and maintenance schedules to follow that are reviewed and scrutinized on a regular basis. In the feed center, we have not done as much of this type of tracking… until now!

I hope that your harvest was a major success and bountiful for your dairy. So, now that it is done and fresh on your mind, what did you learn about this year’s crop? Having this proactive approach sets you up nicely for the year ahead and maximize IOFC. Another important piece of information to have is multiple mycotoxin analyses to verify how clean (or not) the silage crop is.

As I drive the countryside, corn is fully tasseled and ears are filling. So today we will focus on the king of forages: corn silage. Corn silage harvest is such a critical thing for dairies because you get one chance to get it right versus haylage harvest where you can have multiple opportunities if a crop doesn’t go as planned. Getting your game plan around how you are going to make corn silage harvest successful is an absolute must:

It’s that time of year again when the alfalfa has awakened from its winter slumber and is quickly approaching 1^st crop harvest. Are you and your harvest team ready?

Did you know that Tom Brady, arguably the G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time) of football, after his 7^th Super Bowl last February went back to practicing on his plant foot and elbow position just two months after that win? G.O.A.T.’s know that practicing the basics are the most important things to make them successful and perform at a high level. So, what does this have to do with feeding cows and making your dairy better? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is your dairy’s feeder…