Ontario dairy farmers celebrate top score

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

by SUSAN MANN

Dairy farmers Carl, Dave and Ben Loewith have been winning a CanWest DHI Herd Management award for Ontario every year since 2004 and have earned the top score for the entire Ontario and Western Canada region five times previously.

But it always gives them a thrill to win. “We’re most certainly aware of when they’ll be calculating those numbers and we’re kind of wondering if we’ll be able to get it again this year,” Ben Loewith says, noting when they get the call they’ve won they celebrate at the farm near Lynden, take their staff out to dinner, and call their vets and nutritionists to thank them for their part in the win.

The difference this year compared to other years when they won is this was their highest score ever – 994 out of 1,000.

The other two top scoring farms for Ontario for 2011 were: Alexerin farmed by Ron and Todd Nixon of Manotick, and Brakke Farm farmed by Jacob Brakke of Grand Valley. There were also winners for the western provinces.

The DHI herd management score allocates points for performance in six different areas. Loewith says the areas covered in the scoring are: milk value, age at first calving, udder health, longevity measured by the per cent of the herd at third lactation or greater, calving interval measured in months, and herd turnover measured in the per cent of herd replaced on an annual basis.

What did the farmers at Summitholm Holsteins do to earn this award? Loewith says like the other top scorers across Ontario and Western Canada they surround themselves with really good extension specialists and support people, such as nutritionists, vets, crop consultants and custom operators. The Loewiths milk 350 cows.

“The level of knowledge and expertise that’s out there now is probably better than it’s ever been,” he says, noting the farmers with the top scores tend to listen and take the advice of those professionals.

Another thing they do at Summitholm Holsteins, operated by Ben, his father, Carl, and his uncle, Dave, is to have very tight protocols for monitoring sick and fresh cows, how they’re treated, how cows are dried off and when they’re moved from one group to another.  “We follow those protocols very closely,” Ben says, explaining they have systems in place so the protocols are followed every day without exception.

CanWest DHI is a non-profit milk recording organization providing profitable daily management solutions to dairy farmers across Ontario and Western Canada. BF