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Central MN | I think I would be in the dumps too, that deal is affecting more than just the farmers.
And I would say both my opinion and something he inferred. Its hard to have enough time to discuss everything in these studies over a lunch hour and be able talk how we can relate this to smaller scale farms. I personally would maybe say we should split <500 cow group in to 2 groups for instance less than 200 and over 2-500. When comparing these groups to one another we tend to be able have a better control of maybe lets call them "management" types for instance with housing its hard to compare a 50 cow tie stall to a 500 cow freestall, but I would be willing to bet if they would do this same study on say 50-100 cow tie stall dairies and compared them we would see the same health factors and nutrition affecting their overall profitabilty.
In reply to your second question: This is totally my opinion (and maybe they actually did include this), but I'm assuming the reason they only took larger farms was partially because they needed some sort of control hence greater than 500 cows. I'm thinking that they maybe considered that the equipment needed/ cow units and the equipment used would be very similar across this group of Dairies. As would be lets say if the study was on the same 50-100 cow tie stall dairy My guess it would be very similar and have no to little correlation. Im not a expert in statistics but this May also be why Labor costs didnt have any correlation because maybe they were so similar in that bracket in terms of pay, or amount of help per cow units etc. Obviously the Dairy that has all of its land paid for may be making more money but I assume in this case we take into account opportunity costs of renting etc and are considering this as a separate entity off of dairying (what the cows are truly making themselves.)
The hard part is with these types of studies there are literally hundreds of factors that will affect production etc. what they were looking for mainly I think was health.
I sorta rambled and maybe didnt make any sense, but i just think their point was you make more $/cwt ECM by having better health not necessarily having more cows or more total milk production.
Edited by farmforever 4/25/2017 22:49
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10 yr study on financial drivers in Dairy including herd size
