For those who grew up in dairy, feeding calves almost seemed like a right of passage. I remember when I was about 8 years old, I was assigned the task of feeding the calves. By then, my older siblings were in the barn milking. I was expected to make sure the calves had milk twice a day and that their buckets were clean and filled with grain and water.
Honestly, I never really liked feeding the calves. I hated when they would buck their buckets from the holders or they would buck me in the leg. Still to this day, feeding calves is not my favorite thing to do on the farm. I would much rather milk in the nice warm barn than combat frozen water buckets and aggressive calves. Still, the need to take good care of the calves was something instilled in me at a very young age. I remember my dad telling me that if their buckets weren’t clean enough for me to drink from, they weren’t clean enough for them. Healthy calves are the future of every dairy farm.
Up until a decade or so ago, dairy farmers never thought much about the number of calves they were raising on their dairy. Every healthy heifer calf that was born was another potential future member of the milking herd. It didn’t matter whether the heifer calf was from the highest producing cow in your herd or the one that barely made the cut, you still raised that calf hoping to get more replacements into your barn.
Sexed Semen Changes the Game
The introduction of sexed semen in the late 1990s and early 2000s changed that paradigm. In fact, in the last decade, the percentage of dairy semen sales that is sexed rose from about 15 percent in 2014 to 76 percent in 2024. The increased use of beef on dairy advanced that trend at an even faster rate, with beef semen sales nearly doubling in five years, from 5.8 million units in 2019 to 9.7 million units in 2023. During the same period, the percentage of sexed semen sales in dairy also doubled, from 31.9 percent of total dairy sales in 2019 to 76.5 percent in 2024.
Through genetic and genomic advancements, we can now identify those members in our milking herd who will produce the highest quality replacements and build our herds on those cow families while using the poorer performers to create another revenue stream with black calves on the ground. With newborn beef calves bringing as much as $1,000 a head and the cost to raise a replacement approaching $2,500, using more sexed and beef in your herd seemed to make a lot of sense economically.
However, in the past couple of years, that trend has caught up with our industry. USDA recently released its annual Cattle report and reported that only 3.914 million head of dairy heifers are available nationwide as of January 1, a 0.9 percent decrease from the prior year and the lowest recorded inventory since 1978. Only 2.5 million of those heifers are expected to calve in the next 12 months, down about 0.4 percent from the start of 2024. USDA now has the heifer-to-cow ratio at 41.9 percent, the lowest since 1991.
Scarcity Impacting Production
The decrease in dairy heifer inventories is a primary factor limiting US milk production right now, with the latest report showing December milk production down 0.5 percent year over year. Annual production is estimated to be down 0.2 percent from 2023 to 2024, partly due to the HPAI outbreak impacting states like California. However, heifer inventories had an impact on that decrease as well.
Cow numbers are up only 3,000 head from last December to this report. Traditionally, in years of higher milk margins like 2024, you would see cow numbers grow much more dramatically. For example, the nation’s dairy herd increased by 50,000 head in 2022, the last time margins were this strong. Replacement heifers just aren’t available right now. In fact, an average Holstein springer is bringing as much as $3,000, more than double what they were two years ago.
With such high prices for replacements right now, that could mean sexed semen sales continue to grow even more with more producers looking to grow their herds internally instead of buying replacements. The high price of replacements could also encourage other producers to raise more heifers to market them at a premium price as springers. Either way, it’s likely we will see continual shifts in this paradigm as farmers continue to finetune the most profitable way to raise that next generation of their dairy herd.
Editor’s Note: This column is written by Jayne Sebright, executive director for the Center for Dairy Excellence. It was originally published in Lancaster Farming.