(NAFB) – During the Professional Dairy Producers of Wisconsin annual business conference, Dr. Tom Overton hosted a session on “Ways to Fatten up Your Milk Check.”

Overton, from Cornell University, says dairy farming is more than simply selling milk to a processor.

“Especially here in Wisconsin with all the cheese production, I mean milk components are really what are important, right? So milk fat, milk protein, we need both for dairy processing and dairy processors. And so, if we can do a better job of producing milk components, it’s not only valuable for the farmer but it also improves our efficiency of cheese manufacture and things like that, which is good for everybody.”

To increase the components in milk, Overton says that means having the proper inputs.

“There’s a few different things that come into play. One is really striving to produce high quality feed, high quality forage at the farm level, so, silages and hays, and things like that that our farmers make. That is clearly one of the strategies. I think again, there’s a variety of ways that nutritionists can formulate diets to help boost either milk fat or protein production, and there’s a variety of tools at their disposal from nutrition ingredients standpoint to help them do that. At least for the next year component prices look to be very favorable for farmers to try to produce a little bit more.”

Overton adds it’s important to keep feed prices in mind when making changes to dairy cow diets.

“I think a farmer and their advisors can kind of make some economic projections, if there’s increased investment needed from say, an ingredient in the diet, what that cost would be. And then oftentimes, a farmer will know if they get a response to that in terms of their milk fat or milk protein within a week or so. And so, they get fairly quick feedback in terms of whether or not that change actually affected anything, and so it becomes really an economic decision on the part of the farm and whoever they’re working with.”