American ‘mega-dairies’ and vets’ changing role

Phoenix is the seventh largest city in the US and in the Grand Canyon State of Arizona. You have desert, giant cacti, rattlesnakes, scorpions and some very large dairy farms – everything about America is big.

Phoenix is a rapidly expanding city with loads of space and low level buildings, so it does not seem very built up; the freeways through the city also have six or more lanes.

Phoenix only gets about six inches of rain annually and, also every year, it fills up with “snowbirds”. These are people who come down from the northern “cold states” to enjoy the lovely warmth from November to March – then migrate back home for their summer.

I attended the annual National Mastitis Council meeting in Glendale, Arizona, and was going to write all about that; however, before the meeting, I spent a couple of days visiting dairies to find out how dairy vets work in the south-west, which was enlightening and is the focus of this article.

Expanding farms

Back in 1960, there were 340 dairy farms in Arizona with 14,000 cows. Today, there are 69 with 195,000 cows and several of these have 10,000 cows and followers all on one site. These are “mega-dairies” and the average herd size is almost 3,000 cows and rising steadily.

If you talk to the dairy owners about their problems, it’s always the same – labour. Nearly all of the milkers are Mexicans and there are very few young milkers, as their children choose to work elsewhere. Once this generation of milkers retires there is going to be a real staffing problem, just like in the UK.

The same is true with vets – just like in the UK and elsewhere, few want to go for farm work. Vets in the US see farm work as being physically demanding, unrewarding and having no long-term career opportunities. It takes eight years to qualify as a vet; four years for an undergraduate course, then you apply to vet school for a further four years. The cost of university education is very high and many new vets graduate with debts of more than £200,000, which never gets written off, even if they are declared bankrupt.

The limiting factor of these dairies is the number of hours in the day. The size is limited by how many cows you can put through the parlour. One dairy was milking 10,400 cows through two 80-point rotaries that never stopped running. The three milkers had four seconds per cow to carry out their tasks and the platform was rotating every five and a quarter minutes.

The owner of this dairy wanted to put through as many cows per hour, come what may. If teat prep was not great or some cows were not milked out, that was not his concern. He wanted a 30,000-litre tanker to leave the farm full every two hours.

He had a number of other 10,000-cow dairies in the US; there is a trend of some families having a significant number of “mega-dairies”. They have the successful management model and funding to make this work.

All milk produced in Arizona is sold to the United Dairymen of Arizona – an immensely professional, farmer-owned cooperative. Farmers are not allowed to use bovine somatotropin here as consumers do not want this. However, many use Ovsynch programmes on all cows. Some just inseminate their cows on one day a week, as this programme allows them to do so. They regard Ovsynch as being highly labour efficient and don’t really consider the welfare implications or the consumer viewpoints.

Cows are housed mainly in cubicle barns with large exercise yards. They have massive fans and sprinklers everywhere, so when the heat rises, they can be kept cool. Barn sides are open in the winter and then down in the summer to provide shade. Most parlours have giant coolers, which drops the temperature from more than 40°C to under 30°C, so the collecting yards and parlour are pleasantly cool.

Cows are bedded on recycled nature solids and these are put out to dry on land, then scooped up and put on the cubicles. This will be a totally different product to that used in the UK, which has only about 35% dry matter. Clinical mastitis is not a big problem and neither are cell counts. Most herds run under 250, but the cooperative is putting in bonus schemes to drop cell counts to below 150.

Like everywhere else, many of these dairy farmers are losing money. They expect this to happen at times as milk prices in the US are very cyclical. However, as there are no quotas and herds have been expanding and there is now overproduction, the cooperatives don’t want all this milk and so are looking to impose their own quota systems. If farms exceed the quota, the extra milk might not be picked up or the farmer might get paid a token amount for it. It seems everyone in the world is trying to drop the production of milk.

Some herds screen all calved cows and heifers for Staphylococcus aureus and Mycoplasma. The S aureus cow will be put into a Staph group and eventually be culled. Many herds cull any animals testing positive for Mycoplasma straight away. The impact of any new disease being introduced is immense, so vaccination plans and biosecurity measures are carefully adhered to. Many dairies have locked gates to keep everyone out.

Arizona dairymen grow maize and sorghum for silage and also alfalfa hay. All the land is irrigated, and with the heat, they can get eight to nine crops of alfalfa each year. They recycle as much water as possible from the dairies as this is a valuable resource.

The biggest parlour I visited was a 77 × 77 herringbone; that’s 77 milking units on each side, so 154 cows could be milked at any one time. It had four milkers who used a follower leader system. It only took 12 minutes to milk each batch of cows, so this parlour was milking more than 5,000 cows three times a day very efficiently.

Veterinary work

Visiting these herds was a real eye opener and it was very interesting to see how they use and regard dairy vets. In Arizona there are three dairy practices that service 195,000 cows. There are 18 vets in total and so each vet looks after about 11,000 cows. In the UK, if you exclude TB testing, this figure is probably closer to one vet for 3,000 or 4,000 cows. Vets in Arizona have three functions – carrying out rectal palpations, writing prescriptions and drawing up treatment plans. Vets rely on fee income for their profit and run on very low overheads – a truck, mobile phone, surgical instruments and overalls. Everything else they need is on the farm.

Vets will typically start work at 4am or 5am and carry out four to five hours of rectal palpations and that’s their day’s work done. Some use scanners, but the majority don’t. Vets don’t see sick cows as these are treated on-farm following the standard operating procedures for common treatments. They rarely carry out surgery as cows are usually sent straight to slaughter as this makes more economic sense. Cow survival in the really hot summer months is poor. A culled cow is worth about £500 and you can rear a replacement heifer for a little more than £650, so they just don’t mess around.

Many regard dairy vets as people who provide technical services and there is little loyalty. Farms change vets to make cost savings; some farmers now tender for vet services and this drives prices down. Many larger herds use a number of different vets for fertility, mastitis, calf health and so on – they want the best possible technical advice.

I thought it interesting in a herd 12,000 cows it wasn’t thought economically viable to employ its own vet. One farming family, which had 50,000 cows, employed just one vet.

Most of the pharmaceutical companies send their technical vets on farm irrespective of whether this is welcomed by the farmer’s vet or not. The pharmaceutical companies realise they can’t rely on vets to promote their products, so go direct to the end user instead. Farmers welcome this as they are always up to date about what products and vaccines are available. Companies will draw up vaccination plans and treatment schedules, and many provide additional services, such as training.

Semen companies are following suit – some are drawing up and delivering tailor-made reproductive programmes, supplying the inseminator and even carrying out pregnancy diagnosis.

Margins on medicines are low – between 5% and 10%, so few vets bother to dispense medicines. Most farmers buy either directly from the pharmaceutical companies or from distributors.

Adapting to change

Vets are under significant pressure from a number of areas and are having to change how they do things to survive. The speed of change is rapid and many vets are not moving quickly enough to respond. Other service providers, such as the semen and pharmaceutical companies, are taking advantage of this and substituting many vet services, often with no visible cost.

Some vets have diversified into supplying dairy chemicals and liners. Some offer the farmer a fixed price per cow per month for mastitis services to cover the likes of dry cow products, teat dips, liners, lab tests, medicines for treating clinical mastitis, monitoring trends and advising on actions for problem cows. Many admit this can be a bit risky as they are operating on thin margins, but they are just trying to retain business.

Vets are still a trusted source of advice, but many farmers are well educated and don’t get them very involved with the dairy. The key person on the farm is the nutritionist, as feed is by far the biggest cost and where most savings can be made.

This all shows dairying and the role of the dairy vet is rapidly changing and everyone who is involved in supporting the dairy farmer has to adapt to meet his or her ever-changing needs.