Grow – Wisconsin's Magazine for the Life Sciences

The cardinal rule in dairy judging is that, if you’re in doubt, you pick the cow with the best udder. Few people know that better than Brian Coyne, who grew up on a dairy farm near Eau Claire and began judging cows when he was 10. Yet in the biggest contest of his life, he was about to throw that maxim out the window.

Coyne, a CALS senior majoring in dairy science, was getting his first look at a group of Milking Shorthorns—four of the 48 cows he evaluated during the National Intercollegiate Dairy Judging Contest at the 2010 World Dairy Expo—and the first one in line really caught his eye. He liked every part of her, save one: She clearly had the worst udder of the group.

“She was huge,” Coyne recalled later. “She was really clean-cut. She had a big, sharp front end on her.” Despite her mammary shortcomings, she had what Coyne looks for in a great cow: “She was really dairy.”

“Dairy” is a compliment paid often around venues like the World Dairy Expo. You hear it from judges at the event’s seven major breed shows, from onlookers at the big-money cattle sales held each night, and from the visitors who stream through the barns that house nearly 2,500 of the world’s best show cows. The term is a bit of industry shorthand, usually uttered in awestruck tones to explain what separates an outstanding cow from one that’s merely good: “She is just so dairy!”

To be successful in the milk production business, you have to be able to recognize a good cow. Dairy judging contests teach one of the oldest ways of doing that: giving her a good long look, from muzzle to hip bones and rump to hooves, to see how closely she conforms to “true type,” the hypothetical perfect cow. In the most practical sense, being dairy means that a cow has a body that promises great things in the milking parlor.

“We’re talking about openness to rib, a sweeping slant to ribs, overall angularity and length of neck,” explains CALS dairy science instructor Ted Halbach, who coaches the students on the UW-Madison dairy judging team. “It means she looks like she’s giving a lot of milk.” These are traits Halbach knows well. In his dozen years as coach, the UW judging team has won three national championships, including one in 2010. He won the contest himself as part of Wisconsin’s 1980 team, and he’s the son of a winner. His father competed and won as a UW senior in 1939.

But a lot has changed in the 90 years since the national judging contest began. These days, farmers use more than their eyes to tell them about a cow’s milk-making potential. They rely on extensive data about her pedigree and the performance of her mother and aunts and sisters. And now the sequencing of the cow genome—completed in 2009 by a team of 300 scientists from 25 countries—has opened a vault of new data and new possibilities.

That was demonstrated during one of Expo’s biggest events, the Friday night Holstein sale, when auctioneer Tom Morris brought down his gavel to sell a four-month-old calf for $87,000, the highest price paid all week. Two weeks before the auction, that calf had topped a ranking of Holstein heifers by Genetic Total Performance Index, a prediction of her future performance gleaned by scanning her chromosomes for the presence of certain genetic markers. Although the calf came from a long line of top performers, her outstanding genetic report card undoubtedly helped fuel the bidding.

When the University of Wisconsin proposed to set up a genetics department in 1910, it had the enthusiastic backing of W.D. Hoard, publisher of the influential Hoard’s Dairyman magazine. But he wanted a different name. “Genetics,” he said, was a technical term that the state’s dairy farmers wouldn’t understand.

It didn’t take them long to catch on. Through genetic selection, the dairy industry has been able to achieve astounding gains in the quality and quantity of milk that cows make. Since 1939, the nation’s dairy herd has shrunk by 60 percent, but it produces 20 percent more milk because the average cow’s production has more than quadrupled.

Those increases were accomplished through the development of a gene pool that is not only deep, but also extremely well cataloged. In the 1800s, breed associations began keeping herd books to record the pedigrees of high-performing animals. Soon after, the emergence of the Dairy Herd Improvement record system created a standardized way to compare various bulls and cows by keeping track of how much milk their offspring produced. Today the industry collects data on well over half of the nation’s nine million dairy cattle, recording not just milk yield, fat and protein, but also data related to things like health, fertility and milk quality. International producers have adopted the same framework, creating a vast database of cow performance that spans the globe.

For Kent Weigel, a CALS dairy scientist whose work focuses on genetic selection, the records offer a trove of data that can be mined to optimize breeding. “We can statistically analyze those data and figure out which are the best families to select as parents of the next generation,” he says. Currently, the way most breeding companies do that is to collect and sift data on the progeny of their breeding bulls. It’s dependable, says Weigel, but slow. “It’s at least five years before you get any information and can decide if it’s a good bull you want to keep or a bad bull that you want to get rid of.”

In contrast, genomic screening offers immediate feedback. Technicians can take a sample of blood or hair from a newborn calf, extract the DNA, and have an almost instant prediction of how she’ll perform in the herd. This is done by scanning the calf’s genetic code for the presence of certain markers, snips of DNA that are associated with various important traits. Roughly $150 will pay for a scan of 50,000 genetic markers. A new, slightly more expensive version will look at almost 800,000 markers.

“It’s not as accurate (as progeny testing)—not yet,” says Weigel. “We’re in this transition period, starting to move away from the progeny testing to the DNA testing. But decisions based on the DNA test results are taking a greater and greater role.”

Much of the industry’s excitement about genomic screening has focused on having a new to spot the same traits measured by progeny testing—like a cow’s potential for producing milk, butterfat and protein. But genomics promises a much richer lode of data. Over time, it will make it possible to predict traits that are too difficult or expensive to measure on the thousands of commercial farms that supply data to the progeny testing system, such as genetic predisposition to infertility (see related story), or resistance to disease, or how efficiently a cow converts feed into milk.

“To measure feed intake on an individual animal basis you need a lot of labor and specialized equipment. We couldn’t measure it on hundreds of thousands of animals. It would be prohibitively expensive,” says Weigel. “But you can do it on a few thousand cows in research herds and then DNA-test those animals. If it works as we hope, we’d` be able to take specialized traits and put them in a national breeding program.”

Identifying specialized traits could lead to specialized cows. For example, producers who feed their cattle on pasture might be able to select cows that are really good at converting grass to milk. “In the past all you could do is try to select different sire families whose daughters seem to have done better on grass than on total mixed rations,” says Weigel. “You didn’t really know what you were selecting. But now you could test individual animals and target them for grazing, target them for confinement, target them for producing cheese, or for a certain kind of cheese. ”

“It’s far fetched today,” says Weigel. “But not that far fetched. We can imagine being able to do it.”

Back at the World Dairy Expo show ring, it doesn’t take any data mining to see the cumulative effect that a century of breeding has had on dairy cows. Compared to the squat, rounded cows Ted Halbach’s father judged 70 years earlier, today’s cows are bovine supermodels—longer, taller and svelte. This form has followed function: The industry has selected for cows that put energy into making milk rather than meat.

In recent years, however, it’s become apparent that such cows may not have the resilience to thrive in the larger herds that are becoming the norm in the industry. “This cow has to be able to function in the housing environment. She has to have the physical attributes that sustain and support her production,” explains Halbach. “You can have an animal with great production potential, but if she doesn’t have the physical attributes to reach that potential, she won’t. It’s as simple as that.”

Concerned that cows were becoming too frail, the Purebred Cattle Association asked Halbach in 2007 to lead an effort to revise its unified scorecard—the standard for that hypothetical perfect cow. Halbach turned to research conducted by Weigel, who had analyzed 20 years of data on Holsteins and Jerseys to find links between a cow’s physical characteristics and how long she survived in the herd.

“There was a perception that what makes a good dairy cow was her ability to milk herself—to take all this body tissue, mobilize it, make all this milk from it and not have any extra fat on her,” says Weigel. “Well, she also has to do other things, like get pregnant and not get sick and so on. It became fairly clear that that was a trait where we’ve maybe gone too far.”

The revised standards emphasize more balance between strength and dairy character. “We’ve started to get people to think again that, yes, we want cows that produce a lot of milk, but we also want them to not kill themselves doing it,” Weigel says. “We want them to be able to maintain good health.”

Still, the ideal cow epitomized in the revised standards and in the show ring is geared toward a particular kind of dairying, in which cows live in large, open-stall barns and are fed a mixed ration that includes grain, forage, protein and mineral supplements. This is the dominant milk production system in the United States today, but plenty of cows across the nation and around the world live a different kind of life.

“Those cows are Ferraris,” says dairy farmer and UW-Extension agent Vance Haugen, describing the show cows at World Dairy Expo. “That’s wonderful, but I’m not going drive Ferrari on my back forty. I’d rather be driving my Jeep.” Haugen, who operates a pasture-based dairy farm, says he prefers cows with “a little more girth, maybe a wider muzzle so she can graze a little bit better. And smaller.”

Smaller is also better in Central America, says Ysidro Matamoros, an animal scientist from Honduras who brought a group of students to Dairy Expo. In his country, the average dairy herd has about nine cows that subsist on low-quality pasture and endure a brutally hot and humid climate. “She has to be smaller, because she has to dissipate a lot of heat,” he says. She also has to have some meat on her bones, literally. In Honduras—as in many places around the world—much of the milk comes from cows raised for both milk and meat.

What this means is that in an increasingly diverse global dairy industry, there is no ideal. One herd’s perfect cow might be a cull cow in a herd on the other side of the world.

The ability to find genetic markers for hundreds of discrete traits will continue to refine our ability to define perfection on a case-by-case basis. “The idea in the past was to look at what people thought the cow should look like intuitively. What they favored. What they liked to look at,” says Weigel. “Now you’ve got the data telling you what the cow should look like.”

But perfection will always be in the eye of the beholder. Brian Coyne says he will never forget that great Milking Shorthorn with the subpar udder that caught his eye during the national dairy judging contest. Nor will he forget his conversation with the Shorthorn judge in the final portion of the competition, in which contestants give their reasons for ranking the cows the way they did. Coyne dug deep into dairy-judging lexicon to explain why he picked that cow. He talked about her “decided advantage in dairyness, longer and cleaner head and neck and sharply chiseled top line.” But the judge wasn’t buying it. She pressed Coyne, asking how he would have rated the cows on udders alone. By that standard, he admitted, his first-place cow would have gone last.

“The judge gave me this funny look, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I started with my worst-uddered cow,’ and thinking, “I screwed this up really badly.”

Actually, he didn’t mess up much at all. He won the contest with the highest score in event history, and he did okay with the Shorthorns. The one he ranked first belonged in second place. She may not have been the perfect dairy cow, but she was a very dairy cow.

Sidebar

Genetic Counseling for Cows

Professor explores why the best milking cows are often the hardest to get pregnant.

When UW-Madison hired Hasan Khatib as an assistant professor in 2002, his colleagues knew not to expect a typical dairy scientist. A student of human genetics, Khatib had spent three years after earning his doctorate counseling couples about their chances of passing on inherited disorders.

These days, he’s working with a different species—but he’s still doing essentially the same thing.

In his lab. Khatib studies the genes of newly fertilized cow embryos to understand the connections among traits passed down from their parents. For the past several years, he’s been focused on a major frustration for the dairy industry—the fact that today’s super-producing milk cows often have trouble getting pregnant. In fact, during the past 20 years, as milk yields have gone up, pregnancy rates have headed in the other direction, falling by 20 percent.

“A large portion of infertility is because embryos die early, in the first few days of pregnancy,” says Khatib. “That’s why we are focused on this stage of development, where we can identify genetic factors leading to better survivability of embryos, hence increasing fertility of cows.”

Khatib has discovered one reason why increased milk production and infertility go hand-in-hand. He located a gene variant that, when present in homozygous form—two copies, one from each parent—the embryo dies soon after conception. But in heterozygous form, where the cow carries one lethal and one non-lethal variant, the gene is associated with increased milk production.

Because breeders select for higher milk production, Khatib’s data suggests that 65 to 70 percent of Holsteins have that genotype. Breeding heterozygous bulls with heterozygous cows, however, increases the chance of passing on the lethal combination of genes. To avoid that situation, Khatib developed a set of markers that indicate the presence of the gene, which he has patented and licensed to a breeding firm.

“This is like genetic counseling for bulls,” he says. “It’s the same principle: How to use your genetic markers to improve the trait that you’re looking at.”

Mark Stephenson came to campus in July as the college’s new Director of Dairy Policy Analysis and Director of the Center for Dairy Profitability. In these positions, he will take a leadership role in education and research related to dairy policy and dairy market analysis. He comes here from Cornell University, where he spent 17 years as a dairy economist. Before that he spent three years on the faculty at UW-River Falls.

In the early 1990s a lot of people thought Wisconsin’s days as a dairy leader were behind it. You were here then. Did you agree?
Actually, I thought Wisconsin’s dairy industry had a bright future, but it wasn’t clear to most people back then. That was when California had double-digit growth year after year and surpassed Wisconsin as the number-one milk-producing state. It was not obvious at the time that we were going to have the kind of turnaround that we have seen in the last few years in this state.

Why are you bullish about America’s Dairyland?
For the same reason that W.D. Hoard was more than a century ago: He looked at the agronomic resources of this area—the climate, the soils, the potential to grow—and recognized that you could grow terrific grass here. You could grow corn. You could grow what you needed to support animal agriculture, and in his mind the best animal agriculture was dairy. It would yield the most and it would give back to the land the animal waste. We still have those resources here today.

How does that help us compete?
Farms here average an acre-and-a-half or two acres per cow. A California farm may have 10 or 12 acres altogether. They buy all of their feed. We buy part of our feed, but we grow an awful lot of it. That means that in times of price volatility we have more stable input costs. With the price swings and downturns in 2009, farms out west got clobbered much worse then farms in the upper Midwest.

How has Wisconsin dairying turned itself around?
For one thing, our processors aren’t so commodity orientated. Twenty years ago. we were making a lot of cheese, a fair amount of butter and some nonfat dry milk, but these weren’t highly differentiated products. Today our processors have really brought up the game. They’re making a lot of specialty cheese and other products that stand out from the rest of the pack.

What about our farmers?
They looked at what was happening in the West and realized that they could do that too—think about economies of scale and employ a variety of business models, including smaller, pasture-based systems. They began to remold the dairy industry in this state. Our milk production is showing it today.

Milk prices paid to farmers fell by nearly half last year. Why didn’t the price of a bottle of milk follow suit?
There is a strong relationship between retail prices and what farmers receive, but you wouldn’t expect them to move in lockstep. Milk may be the major ingredient in dairy products, but it is not the only cost. Other costs—labor in the plants, transporting the milk, the energy used in the plant and the store, everything needed to get it to the checkout counter—haven’t changed. The other thing is that consumers do not like prices bouncing around a lot. We all like a sale, but we don’t like it to be $2 a gallon one week and $4 a gallon the next, so retailers try to buffer those changes. Sometimes their margins shrink, maybe even to negative numbers, and sometimes they grow.

We now have farms milking 5,000 or 6,000 cows. Is this is a positive thing for Wisconsin?
I don’t think it is a bad thing. I think that the state would do itself wrong to automatically decide not to allow these farms to look for opportunities to lower their costs. I think folks who have a negative connotation about those types of farms should visit one and take a tour. Your image of a “factory farm” might evaporate. You might see that cows are treated very comfortably and humanely. It is not the case that because these farms are big, they are bad. And it is not the case that because they are big, they aren’t family farms.

Will there still be a place for 80- or 100-cow herds in Wisconsin?
There will. Some might need to change their business model, for example, going from a tie-stall barn and selling milk to a co-op to becoming a grazer, perhaps even seasonal grazing. This lower-input approach could be particularly useful for a farm that needs a capital refresh that the operator isn’t prepared to make—where the silos and buildings and equipment are too worn-out to function. Those who want to milk fewer cows can also consider adding value to their milk—sell it not as milk, but as a finished consumer product. This requires a lot of new skills and homework, but some farms are doing it and doing it well.

But that’s not a panacea?
Those approaches work for individual farms, but they can’t account for the volume of milk that we produce in Wisconsin. You couldn’t have 10,000 small value-added dairy processors. We don’t have the consumer market here for that much dairy product, so those folks would have to be become much more intelligent marketers and get well outside of their geographic boundaries.

So who’s going to consume all the additional milk and cheese and yogurt?
If we want to support that growth, we have to look for new markets. We are finding new ways to use milk and entice consumers into using different kinds of dairy products, but a lot of that growth is going to be through export. Other countries have been doing it for a long time and we need to get better at it. We need to understand our customers better. If we delivered a product that a retailer didn’t want in this country, we would take care of that quickly. We’ve been a bit more relaxed in dealing with export customers. It is harder to service customers overseas, but we need to get them the products and the packaging they want. We are only beginning to become deeply involved in that.

Can the university help with that?
We can help processors to better understand global markets. The United States has tended to use world markets to sell what we have in surplus—like nonfat dry milk. But the rest of the world isn’t used to nonfat dry milk—they are used to skim milk powder. Most of the world wants butter that is 82 percent fat. We produce ours at 80 percent. If we want to sell a commodity around the world, we have to make what the world wants.

What counsel can you offer to farmers who have seen their profits evaporate and their net worth plunge in the last couple of years?
I don’t anticipate prices having the kind of rebound that will restore all of the lost equity we had over the last year and a half in any short time period. I think it’s going to be a crawl back for a lot of people. That’s the reality of this. But prices have been stronger here than in the rest of the country, and the costs of producing milk have been relatively lower. So people can look for a better margin of profitability here. They will be restored more quickly than in most places.

So there’s a good reason that we’re America’s Dairyland.
Some of the best operations around the country have moved from the West and Southwest to the Midwest because they see this. It’s an advantage to be able to grow your own forage base as opposed to buying it. It’s an advantage to be in a cooler climate with these high-producing cows. We’ve had also had a lot of growth internally from dairy producers who have realized that a different type of farming system could be even more profitable. They’ve done it because they recognize that this is a great place to produce milk.