PRO-DAIRY Dairy Profit Monitor

By Lainey Koval

Offered since 2008, farmers have used PRO-DAIRY’s Dairy Profit Monitor (DPM) to benchmark and monitor their business operating performance. PRO-DAIRY farm business management specialists have reviewed this data to identify trends and quantify progress over the past 16 years.

DPM is an online tool that provides a monthly snapshot of key production and financial metrics to farm owners, managers, and consultants in the form of reports that promote discussion, highlight areas for improvement, and track the impacts of management changes over time.

Participating farms create a report each month by entering basic farm characteristics, such as milking frequency, cow breed, barn style, bedding type, and percent raised versus purchased information for replacement animals and forages. Filters can be selected to benchmark a farm to a similar operation. Next, farms enter revenue data from their monthly milk check. For performance metrics, herd health information found in herd tracking software is entered. And finally, on the expense side: feed, bedding, veterinary, and labor costs are entered for the month. Feed tracking software aids in collecting accurate feed data for many farms, with the focus on lactating cow diets. After inputting all necessary farm data, the report is reviewed by a DPM administrator before it receives a “validated” status. After validation, the approved month may be used to benchmark within the program.

Today, 100 farms in New York State, and additional farms nationwide, use DPM. DPM also hosts over 16 years of farm production and cost performance data, with over 100 farms that participated in almost all years. With this historic data, DPM has captured the constant strive for improvement by the participating farms from year to year. To quantify this impact, monthly validated DPM data for New York, Vermont, Maine, and Connecticut dairies from 2008 through 2023 was used to look at trends for several performance metrics. 

Graphs in the PRO-DAIRY fact sheet show trends in the areas of herd performance and management, labor efficiency, feed efficiency, and cost performance. For some metrics it is valuable to look at both annual and monthly averages to see the impact that seasonality has on Northeast dairy herds. It is important to note that although the number of participating farms per year was relatively consistent from year to year, there are differences in the number of farms with validated data each month, and they are not the same farms over all 16 years. Only data from validated months was used for the purpose of this project. Each graph represents data averaged for all farms in the data set. It should also be noted that though some Jersey herds are in the data set, most farms are Holstein herds.

Some highlights from the 16 years of participation:

• Average pounds of milk produced per cow per day increased almost 10 pounds.
• Percent butterfat increased from the mid 3.6 percent range to 4.2 percent, starting in 2011.
• Percent protein increased from 3.06 to just under 3.23, with most of the increase occurring since 2018.
• The combination of increased milk production and higher percent components led to pounds of butterfat and protein pounds per cow per day to increase from just over 5 pounds to 6.2 pounds.
• Percent forage initially ranged between 57 and 58 percent, fell to a low of under 54 percent in 2015 and rebounded back to between 57 and 58 percent by 2021.
• Pounds of energy and protein corrected milk per pound of dry matter fed increased from between 1.45 to 1.5 to over 1.60 for the last three years.
• Labor efficiency increased from 43 cows per worker equivalent to 53 cows per worker equivalent.