Bringing dairy data together in new ways

Milk quality and heat detection are the top-of-mind benefits for dairy producers from the data that’s available when upgrading milking equipment to include sensors. 

But dairy geneticists can also benefit from on-farm sensor data to develop new tools for producers that can fine-tune breeding programs and make milk production more sustainable. 

Why it matters: The dairy sector has long been a leader in the collection of data through industry-tied organizations, but greater on-farm data creation is challenging how it is shared and used.

At Lactanet’s most recent Open Industry Session, the nationwide milk recording and dairy genetic improvement organization outlined how other sensor-based information could be used to reduce methane emissions and the cost of metabolic body weight.

“There has recently been a lot more activity and attention on finding new data sources and collecting data from on-farm technologies and sensors, including from automatic milking systems,” Lactanet geneticist Dr. Alison Fleming told Farmtario in an interview after the June 9 session.

Fleming’s presentation outlined Lactanet’s creation of a genetic evaluation for sires and daughters that predicts how costly it will be to feed the offspring solely to maintain body weight. She noted this cost differs from the “marginal cost” of feeding the cow what’s necessary to maintain a profitable level of milk production.

Fleming said this evaluation tool, set to be released for sires in either December 2022 or April 2023 with a goal to allow “producers to use the trait to select for reduced costs related to body maintenance,” has no relation to Lactanet’s recently finalized Feed Efficiency evaluations.

“(Feed Efficiency values) are purposely designed to be genetically independent of metabolic body weight and energy corrected milk by accounting in the calculations for energy that is being used for these sources,” said Fleming. “The aim of Feed Efficiency is to select for cows that use less feed at the same level of production and body size after peak of lactation.”

What made it possible to create the new tool — which, for now, will only tackle the Holstein breed — was the existence of nearly 150,000 records about body condition score and body weight. These are almost exclusively from Quebec, with a few from the Atlantic provinces, and were gathered over more than 20 years by mostly Quebec-based feed advisory services. The records of daughters are from 1,100 herds and represent the progeny of 5,763 sires.

Lactanet’s analysis of these numbers shows that heritability of body maintenance is 0.33 among first-lactation cows and rises to 0.42 and 0.46 in second and third lactation. According to Fleming, judging from the sires represented in the records, “there is a genetic trend” among daughters to maintain body condition.

A lengthy list of Lactanet’s established trait parameters, mostly related to conformation, show positive relationships to body maintenance, while “longevity” and “reproductive disorders” can be negatively affected by a good body maintenance score.

Fleming said it’s important to note that Age at First Service and Body Condition Score did not show positive relationships.

“That’s something that we’ll have to keep an eye on.”

She noted, however, that feed advisory services are in decline in Quebec, and there has never been any systematic collection of this type of data in the other provinces. Lactanet is actively searching for herds across Canada that have collected body weight records — either through scales or heart girth measurements — independently on their farms.

But especially since the advent of total mixed rations, this hasn’t typically happened.

“We do need to start thinking about a national strategy for the collection of this data … because it is very useful information,” Fleming said. “If there is a way to start collecting some of this data from robotic herds that have scales, that would be great.”

Interviewed by Farmtario after her presentation, she says that body weight “is not the primary target of the data collection” in robotic milking systems but she would still like to “find out how many herds do have scales in their facilities and if they would be willing to share body weight information.”

Measuring methane

Meanwhile, a recently announced partnership between Lactanet and an arms-length Alberta government agency with the task of allocating research funding is working to facilitate diary farmers’ sharing of a different type of data: measurements of cow methane emissions.

During the open industry session, University of Guelph PhD candidate Hinayah Rojas de Oliveira delivered a presentation in which she described successful efforts to quantify emissions from a given cow using Milk MIR (mid-infrared) records from milk samples in six countries.

Five of those countries, including Canada, use the same type of spectroscopy equipment to analyze Milk MIR, so work is underway with Lactanet as a partner to create a genetic evaluation tool for farmers who want to include methane emissions as a breeding priority.

De Oliveira said Milk MIR is the preferred measuring parameter because other more direct methods of tracking methane emissions — including sensors in feed mangers or milking robots or so-called “sniffers” adapted from the industrial sector to detect airborne contamination — are too expensive.

But Lactanet’s new Alberta partnership will hopefully determine if sniffers really are too expensive. Like Fleming, she hopes farmers will share data about body weight, and they’re also looking to dairy producers with automated milking systems to get involved.

According to Lactanet’s Chief Services Officer Brian Van Doormal, “the collection of real on-farm individual cow methane emissions data cannot be done on a widespread basis (and is) currently (only being) done in two research herds in Canada.

“While this is great, we need a solution that is more sustainable in the longer term and believe that collection in a group of commercial dairies in addition to research herds is the path forward,” he added.

To that end, Lactanet was recently granted funding from the arm’s-length Results Driven Agricultural Research agency to install sniffers in “a handful of robot herds in Alberta.”

“We are also interested in leveraging this effort to include herds in some other provinces as well, if possible,” said Van Doormal.

For now, Lactanet is confident in the Milk MIR analyses, and Van Doormal told Farmtario the organization “plans to use ‘methane prediction’ data as the basis for our genetic evaluations.” That won’t move forward until after a recommendation from the organization’s Genetic Evaluation Board, which met in mid-June, followed by approval from the board of directors in July.

“In general, we are surely targeting an official launch (of the methane emissions breeding tool) within the next year,” he said.