Good Management Practices for Successful Dairy Farming in India
Dairy farmers’ production systems worldwide must be able to combine profitability with the responsibility of protecting human health, animal health, animal welfare and the environment. In order to access markets successfully, all in the dairy supply chain must take up that responsibility, from the farmer producing the milk to the eventual customer. Dairy farmers, as the primary producers in the supply chain, must be given the opportunity to add value to their product by adopting methods of production that satisfy the demands of processors and customers.
The role of dairy farmers is to ensure that good agricultural, hygienic and animal husbandry practices are employed at the farm level. The focus should be on preventing a problem (including animal diseases) rather than solving it after it has occurred. Good dairy farming practices should contribute to ensuring milk and milk products are safe and suitable for their intended use.
Dairy farming is a decision-intensive enterprise on a daily basis, which must rely on holistic approach to maintain a profitable system that is accountable to consumers for well-being, environmental impacts, and product quality. However, the narrow profit margin in dairy farming has intensified the drive for increasing the production and efficiency. Among various options in effective management of dairy farm, focusing on individual animal is one of the effective methods apart from group or herd management. Smallest production unit in the dairy is the individual cow. Hence, precision agriculture in general, and precision dairying in particular, aims to manage the basic production unit in order to exploit its maximal production capacity.
Farm management is defined as ”a decision-making process in which the available but limited production resources are allocated to selected production alternatives, so as to operate the farm business in such a way as to attain some set objectives’’. The objective could be profit maximization and/or achieving some other issues
Similar to other management responsibilities, dairy farm management includes three key management functions. These are Planning, Implementation and Monitoring & Evaluation. Implementing Good Management Practices (GMP) in dairy industry is the tool for prosperity. Some of the key indiciators of GMP are as below:
Forage Production Management
Forage production management covers all activities from ‘seed to feed’, including major agronomic practices for forage production, forage conservation, storage and feed supply. The main objective of forage production management is ensuring year round forage supply for the farm, and covering more feed from on farm forage production.
Feed & Nutrition Management
Feed and nutrition management is the process of understanding the nutrient requirement of dairy cattle at different growth and lactation stage and combining various feed ingredients to meet these needs in a cost effective manner. Dairy cattle nutrition management is a very important farm management area for two reasons: 1. Nutrition plays a very important role to maintain health and productivity of dairy cattle; 2. Feed is a big part of the cost to produce milk, nearly 60-70%. Since feed is major variable cost that has direct influence on the amount of milk and cost of milk production, it needs a careful management from farmers/farm owners’ side.
Fertility Management
Good fertility management is potentially one of the most effective means of improving the sustainability, efficiency and profitability of dairy farm. Good fertility management means cows must calve at the right time of the year, must be seen in heat, served efficiently and got in-calf as quickly as possible. Objective of fertility management includes, to produce enough replacement,to improve dairy herd productivity;
Young Stock Management
Sufficient young stock reared will mean that no animals need to be bought from outside the farm. This will reduce the risk of bringing diseases to the farm and also increased the farm profitability and sustainability. Rearing enough young stock (pregnant heifers) in order to replace all culled dairy cows and to reduce average age at first calving and Reducing Mortality rate of calves up to 2 weeks of age
Housing & Manure Management
Good Housing + Good Management = More Milk
A pressing, and often-overlooked matter that poses a significant challenge on most of today’s dairy farms is maintaining cow comfort. There are a wide variety of environmental stressors that must be taken into consideration in a dairy farm management, and they have a direct impact on the production level of the cows. Some of these stressors include; heat stress, poor ventilation, improper stall/feed-bunk design, and not having adequate access to water. Conditions such as these are not only stressful to the cows, but also greatly affect their physiology and productivity. Many of the farm management aspects such as feeding, breeding, quality milk production, disease control, easiness for
manure handling, household labour division & workload, etc. are invariably influenced by the type of housing the farmer has for the dairy animals.
Health Management
Health management is very important to ensure the optimal care and well-being of dairy cattle and to reduce losses in productivity caused by disease and mismanagement. Livestock health is often discussed in terms of the whole herd. That is because whether you have 1 cattle or 100, what distresses one easily can affect the others. Therefore, the health of each animal on the farm is equally important.
Hygienic Milk Production and Marketing
Maintaining a high standard of hygiene is one of today’s most important milk production objectives. Attention to hygiene will ensure high quality milk produced from healthy animals. High quality raw milk leads to a satisfactory economical gain to dairy farmers. From public’s health point of view, milk is a very good media for bacterial and other micro organisms development. As such, disease hazard in public can easily be predisposed by infected milk during production, handling and marketing. As a business, milk which is not available for human and economical use is a loss to the producing farmer.
Dairy Farm Records
Record keeping is a necessary element of good dairy management. With no written records, farmers have to depend on their memory while making decisions regarding their farm practices. But, memories can become unreliable after a few days, months or years. Therefore, it has no substitute for having recordings of information on different aspects of the dairy farm.
There is need to motivate dairy owners for adoption of scientific management practices in rearing of milch animals for better health and performance.
“Indian dairy scientists estimate that climate change will lead to decline in milk production by over 3 million tonnes (MT) per year by 2020. The projections, shared by the Nation Dairy Development Board (NDDB) with the agriculture ministry, should be cause for worry considering the growing demand for milk in the country, estimated at 200 MT by 2021-22”.
Conclusion:
The efficient management of a dairy farm is very important to ensure better profits and sustainability on a long-term basis. By making use of efficient automation, one can take dairy farm business to new heights of success. A profitable farm is one where the cattle are healthy, and optimum results are attained for the dairy farm owner.
Madhusudhan Rao
DeputyDirector
TSDDCF,Adilabad:504001
Cell: 9121160553
