Management guides for insemination and replacement decisions

Decisions to inseminate and replace cows should be based on expected future income. Two management guides are described to help dairy farmers make decisions 1) profit after conception for decisions on insemination and 2) future profitability for decisions on immediate replacement and veterinary treatment. Management guides are obtained by comparing expected cash fiow of a cow currently in the herd with that of a cow currently in the herd with that of a replacement heifer entering the herd at different times. Besides optimum decisions, management guides indicate expected loss when making an nonoptimum decision. This allows farmers to weigh additional information on cow or herd and to rank cows on expected profitability. Dynamic programming can be used to calculate management guides for all possible states of a cow for a given price and production situation. Results can be used to derive management guides for individual cows in a herd, characterizing each cow by state variables. Most information needed on cows can be taken from milk recording data and breeding records. Lactation number, milk production, and stage of lactation clearly affect the management guides.