Publishable Electronic Records

Reference ID:589

Whereas…

Whereas Lactanet’s vision is to provide the premier source of information and innovative solutions for Canadian dairy farmers while ensuring global leadership in the dairy industry and;

Whereas, many dairy farmers have invested heavily in milking technology that provides daily data (milk weights, fat and protein measures, SCC) to use for herd management. There is also a huge amount of data being generated (i.e. milk speed, number of visits) that is not being collected at all from these herds that could be used for breed improvement and;

Whereas, due to increasing operating costs and the stagnant price of milk, many producers are looking at ways to cut costs; if milk recording no longer provides them an abundance of novel information for herd management, it will be discontinued and;

Whereas, with less and less herds contributing their data to the national database the overall quality of the industry’s data will be compromised. Additionally, data from these farms would no longer be available to contribute to bull proofs or be used to support genomic numbers in the future.

Therefore…

Therefore, be it resolved, that Lactanet provide a service that allows the electronic collection of production data for recording of complete, publishable records from herds with the ability to collect data from on-farm systems, with the additional goal of developing more suitable reports for these farms to add value to milk recording and to add value to existing services that no longer provide novel information to this type of producer.

Reference information provided by Lactanet:

There are currently 115,000 cows in robotic milking systems using regular DHI services where samples are collected routinely. There are an additional 13,500 cows currently enrolled in the eDHI service where milk production and sensor data (optional) is collected remotely. Most of the 950+ herds with robot milking systems also receive the specialized Robot Report – which provides performance and benchmarks on metrics unique to robot systems (eg. kg fat/box, cow refusals, robot failures, robot free time, robot milkings per day).