If you lose the number, or want to change it because you changed your mind about who you want to give access to, call us at 800-827-3442. You can ask who has access and we will look it up for you.

Eugene Stoeckel from Princeton, has been a Field Representative for Isanti County DHIA since January 1986. Currently, in his unit, Gene services 16 herds.

This past year Gene went that extra mile and attended the Quality Counts meetings hosted by the University of Minnesota last fall as well as being trained for taking bulk tank and individual cow cultures.

Along with DHIA, Gene operates a farm raising corn and beef cattle. Gene has been an active leader in the agricultural community. He helps with the Isanti County 4-H Dairy show as well as the East Central District Holstein show. Before his career with DHIA, Gene was an Ag teacher.

In his spare time, Gene enjoys golfing, fishing and hunting.

Your DHIA Field Rep reports the last 3 milk shipments on each sample day. The purpose of this Standard Operating Procedure is to compare the milk produced on DHIA sample day to the amount of milk produced on the 3 or 6 days prior to sample day. We don’t expect the data to match perfectly, because we are comparing different days and herds are dynamic. Dynamic means you never have the same herd 2 days in a row. Most cows are one day in milk more than they were yesterday, some have dried off, some have calved, some are in heat or off feed. The beauty of this system becomes apparent when we look at the results.

We take this sample day comparison and combine it with all the other sample days for the last year to give us an annual comparison to milk sold. We find that over time, the numbers tend to balance out. 67% of Minnesota DHIA herds are at or under national average of 103% milk sold. The average is not 100% because of milk fed to calves, cats, kids, and milk that is produced but not put in the tank (high SCC cows for example).

93% of our herds are at or below 106%, and only 43 herds are above 110%. Take the average herd with 100 cows and a 20,000 pound herd average. If that herd is at 110% milk sold, it is producing an average of 10% more milk on each sample day than it is selling on the days ahead of sample day. If our numbers are reported correctly, 10% of 20,000 pounds equals 2,000 pounds per cow per year, times 100 cows equals 200,000 pounds of milk being produced on that farm that is not being sold. That amounts to $26,000 at $13 per cwt.

All Field Reps have a troubleshooting form that can prove helpful in looking at causes of abnormal milk sold. Abnormal herds may have an on-farm visit to help solve the problem, after completing the troubleshooting form. Milk shipment records should be available to the DHIA Field Rep on the form left by the milk hauler.

The weakness of the system is that it is based on the accuracy of the bulk tank. The most common cause of abnormal milk sold percents is the milking system used in combination with meters. We note that on a huge portion of the herds we service, this is not a problem.

A current client of ours said that he sent two hay samples to Stearns DHIA Lab for analysis. The buyer probed the same hay, sent the samples to a competitor of ours and the two samples came up 20 points different in RFV from Stearns DHIA Lab. This client couldn’t believe the differences and was wondering why this happens. The client was told that we would analyze the samples in our chemistry lab and the ground samples would be sent to the other lab. We then asked for the ground samples back from the other lab and sent them to the University of Minnesota’s forage lab. The results are listed below.

#1	DHIA NIR	Chem. Lab #1	Chem. Lab #2	Competitor	UofM NIR	UofM Chem.
ADF	31.11	31.93	31.87	32.68	31.14	31.61
NDF	36.39	36.53	37.62	40.54	37.15	36.81
RFV	165.30	163.04	158.43	145.57	161.86	162.43

As you can see from these two samples that there are significant differences from Stearns DHIA Lab to the Competitor especially with NDF and RFV. There is also a large difference from the UofM to the Competitor. Stearns DHIA Lab and the UofM however compare quite well. You must remember that every point of NDF is about 3.7 points of feed value. So a difference of three percentage points of NDF will give you about 11.1 points of RFV difference.

We then sent two ground samples from NFTA (National Forage Testing Association) to the Competitor and the UofM. There are about 148 labs that belong to NFTA and the NFTA Mean that is listed is from all the labs that participate. Most commercial labs belong to NFTA and are graded from the Mean. Here are the results:

From these results you can once again see that the largest differences are with the NDF and RFV and the ADF was significantly different on sample AH-06 from the NFTA mean in the Competitors lab. Stearns DHIA Lab and the UofM compare very well on these samples as they did with the first two.

The conclusion to this experiment is that Stearns DHIA Lab and the UofM ran very close on these four samples and was relatively close to the NFTA Mean. The Competitor’s lab was somewhat different. There will always be differences between laboratories but when it comes to accuracy Stearns DHIA Lab has once again proven itself as a high quality and accurate testing facility. We hope this will help put and end to the ongoing rumor.