Strategic Culling Decision

Strategic Culling Decision

By Jaclyn Krymowski for American Dairymen

Culling is an ongoing task for every dairy producer, and deciding which cows go and which cows stay has a tremendous impact on profitability. Understanding exactly why cows are actually leaving the herd can turn this mundane, often unpleasant task into valuable strategic insight. Patterns found here can help expose weaknesses in management and be used to diagnose issues.

To do this effectively, culling protocol should be tied to larger herd objectives such as increased production or profitability or improved reproductive performance or health.

According to Donna M. Amaral-Phillips and Lauren King in their University of Kentucky article Dynamics and Strategies for Culling in a Dairy Herd, cull cow prices can represent 5-15% of a dairy’s gross income. With stakes like that, culling should be included in the overall herd management strategy rather than a reactionary response to a problem.

Types of culling

Culling decisions generally fall into one of two categories: involuntary and voluntary.

Involuntary culling happens when a cow develops a sudden or unexpected problem that forces her out of the herd with little or no advance notice. Because these exits aren’t planned, they tend to hit the bottom line harder. Common reasons for involuntary culling include chronic disease, infertility, severe mastitis, lameness, injury and death or emergency removal.

Michal Lunak, an extension educator at Pennsylvania State University Extension, puts it directly in his article Cull Rates: How is Your Farm Doing?:

“Involuntary or biological culls can be costly for the herd, may reduce income, and increase heifer raising costs. Evaluating the reasons that cows are leaving the herd can help to target the management areas that need improvement.”

Voluntary culling is when cows are selected for removal because they’re performing at the bottom of the herd relative to the operation’s overall goals. Typical targets include low producers, cows with persistent reproductive issues such as repeated failure to rebreed, and animals with poor genetics for the traits the herd is trying to improve. Age can also factor into a voluntary cull decision, particularly when an older cow’s production or reproductive performance has started to slip.

Removing low producers voluntarily makes room in the barn for more productive cows or younger animals. Cows that are repeat offenders at rebreeding, or that consistently throw undesirable traits, are natural candidates for this list.

“Most of the cows culled in this category should be from the bottom of the herd, making room for more profitable cows,” says Lunak. “A high percentage of voluntary culled cows is required to maximize profits.”

Why good cows leave the herd

Whether a cow leaves the herd voluntarily or involuntarily, the underlying reasons tend to cluster around a fairly consistent set of issues across most dairy operations. The major causes include low milk yield, reproductive failure, mastitis, lameness and metabolic disorders, which often show up as poor feed conversion efficiency or ongoing nutritional issues that a cow simply can’t overcome.

Poor temperament is a less obvious but still very legitimate factor. Cows that are difficult to handle or work with create daily friction and safety risk for the people managing them.

Structural problems matter just as much. A cow needs a solid foundation of strong feet and legs to hold up under the demands of a modern production system. The same holds true for mammary systems. Poor conformation is a strong predictor that she will not have longevity. Old age and chronic illness round out the list, both representing situations where a cow’s future value to the herd has declined below what a replacement could offer.

Create key performance indicators

Herd goals and culling goals only mean something if there’s a way to measure whether the right decisions are actually being made. A set of key performance indicators (KPIs) gives management an objective read on how culling strategy is playing out in practice.

All KPIs will vary from dairy to dairy, but some general ones include:

Annual culling rate

Pregnancy rate

Days open

Somatic cell count

Milk production by lactation

Lameness prevalence

Mastitis incidence

Replacement heifer availability

Metrics like these tend to work best as a set, since they collectively point toward what the herd is trying to achieve through breeding, production and overall management. Setting specific numeric targets for each of these indicators, rather than tracking them loosely, gives management a clear roadmap for when intervention is or isn’t needed.

Your Culling Criteria

A sound culling decision is often the product of weighing production, reproduction, health, genetics and economics together. Understanding how each one interacts with the others is how the skillful herdsman selects in a way that builds rather than subtracts from the herd.

Production

Production based culling decisions should start with how a cow compares to the herd average and their contemporaries. Peak milk performance early in lactation and the persistence of that lactation curve over time both matter. For example, a cow that peaks well but drops off quickly may be a different kind of concern than one with a flatter, more consistent curve.

Reproduction

On the reproductive side, the relevant factors include number of services, current pregnancy status, days in milk, and calving interval. Amaral-Phillips and King describe this in detail.

“Well managed herds identify their voluntary cull cows early into lactation. These cows are then placed on a ‘Do Not Breed’ List to eliminate the extra expense of breeding. The cows that should be placed on this list include those that have reproductive tract abnormalities, fail to become pregnant after multiple services, or have chronically high somatic cell counts. These cows have the potential to generate lower net income. Cows who will hurt the bottom line should not have a place in the herd. Identifying these cows early results in cost savings as money is not spent breeding these cows.”

Health

Health culling considerations include chronic mastitis, repeated metabolic disease, a history of lameness, and chronic infections such as Johne’s disease. These health issues should nott just trigger individual culling decisions in isolation. When the same health problems keep showing up across multiple cows, it is worth stepping back and evaluating the ration, the housing environment, or anything else the herd is routinely in contact with.

Genetics

Genetic culling decisions should flow directly from the herd’s overall breeding goals. Lifetime production, genomic value, daughter performance and broader breed improvement goals all factor in here.

Economics

Economics ties every other category together. Feed cost, milk income, treatment expenses, cull cow market value, replacement heifer cost, lost future milk production, salvage value, the impact on herd genetics, labor implications, and feed efficiency all factor into whether keeping or culling a given cow is the more profitable choice. And that doesn’t even include the market value of said cull cows, which sometimes is enough on its own to outweigh the benefits of keeping some questionable animals in the herd. In today’s market with replacements being pricey yet cull cows commending higher beef prices, you may want to adjust your voluntary decisions and maybe have a lower threshold for the involuntary ones.

Lunak’s Penn State Extension article notes that one clinical case of mastitis has been estimated to cost $325-$426 depending on whether the cow is in her first lactation or a later one, and that a case of retained placenta or displaced abomasum can cost a producer as much as $130-$280 in lost milk production. He also points out that it takes over three lactations for a producer to recoup the roughly $2,000 cost of raising a replacement heifer, while the average cow’s productive life runs only about 2.7 lactations making involuntary culling, which tends to remove cows earlier and less predictably, especially costly.

Amaral-Phillips takes a similar economic lens in her companion article Are You Making ‘Profitable Culling’ Decisions? In it, she describes the concept of a “retention pay-off value” that economists use to compare the lifetime income potential of a replacement heifer against that of the cow she’d be replacing.

When that value is negative, replacing the cow is the more profitable choice; when it’s positive, keeping her makes more economic sense. Tools like the one developed by Victor Cabrera’s research laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with a similar calculator from the University of Florida, let managers plug in current milk prices, feed costs, replacement costs, and cull cow values to run that comparison for individual animals rather than relying on gut feel.

In an ideal world, culling is planned rather than reactive the majority of the time. Consistent, data driven culling steadily improves long-term profitability and the overall sustainability of the herd. Regularly reviewing herd performance against the key indicators covered above is what allows management to keep refining replacement and retention decisions rather than repeating the same avoidable losses year after year.

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