There is no excuse for not keeping quality data on dairy farms

COMPUTER programmes to help with record keeping on dairy farms are easy-to-use and, more often than not, free to run.

Vet Bruce Richards said an increasing number of clients with his practice – the Cumbria-based Paragon Veterinary Group – were milk recording and that meant the data was already available for the computer programs to utilise and generate meaningful reports.

In the past ‘one of the biggest hurdles’ for vets on farms had been finding records ‘that meant something’, he said, but now there was no excuse for not having quality data that reflected exactly what was happening.

“There’s plenty of stuff out there,” he said. “There’s still the old way of getting the medicine book out and counting the number of treatments but it’s much harder and you must be much more driven.”

These ‘meaningful’ records were essential for farm health planning in order to identify a problem and then monitor progress made in resolving it.

Computer programs could help save time in this area and make understanding the data – through the use of graphics (graphs and tables) – much easier.

They could often also aid benchmarking, be it on-farm through regular recording, within a regional group, or within national data sets.