What's Your Ideal Grassfed Cow? | 100% Grassfed Organic Dairy Panel

This article first appeared in the October 2024 issue of Graze. We're sharing it here in full to give you a taste of the practical content we offer in each issue of the magazine. For the full meal, subscribe today!

Our 100% grassfed organic dairy panel writes every other issue sharing their perspective on a variety of topics and issues pertinent to 100% grassfed dairy production. This month they talked grassfed genetics.

Dwight Stoltzfoos

Cows that are well adapted to a zero-grain, full-forage diet are important on a dairy like ours. What breed or color they are is less important to us than the actual traits. My father crossed his Holsteins to Jersey and New Zealand Friesians in the 90s after moving to serious grazing and organic certified. By the late 2000s the NZ Friesians were averaging under 1000 lbs. bodyweight, and we were slowly decreasing grain before quitting completely in 2012.

We switched our A.I. genetics over to mostly Norwegian Red with some good Australian Ayrshire from John O’Brien mixed in. Around 2018 after 8-10 years of this push toward the mid-sized Ayrshire, we discontinued the three weeks of A.I. at the beginning of the annual June breeding season as we finally had enough of our own home-raised bulls to go all natural. We did introduce two nearly pure Fleckvieh bulls to the herd about 3-4 years ago and this year are milking our first daughters out of those bulls.

The combination of Ayrshire/Norwegian Red and Fleckvieh seems to really fit our system well as we like the deep chested and thick-legged cows with wide leg spacings (especially front legs) that we are seeing more and more of. We also observe that the red cows average a bit less sensitive than black cows to the heat extremes we experience here in southeast Pennsylvania.

The average cow we have now does not have difficulty maintaining good body condition and an approximately 10,000-lb. rolling herd average. The narrower chested cows that still come through occasionally do not last nearly as long as the wider cows we have. We are seeing our average number of cows over 10 years old continue to increase in the herd.

As we learn more about the value of epigenetics (how genetics interact with your farm environment), we are seeing an obvious increase in health and overall sturdiness in our calves/heifers after the switch to all bull breeding. It is a big deal when both the bull and the cow are in your farm’s ecosystem and have the opportunity to pass the desirable traits on to their offspring. The bulls we raise ourselves are started on nanny cows along with our heifer calves. They have the healthy natural flight zone and have never been a threat to the humans working around them.

We are very happy with the gradual progression of our genetics as they relate to our management and environment and recommend these considerations to anyone producing for or considering the all-grass milk market opportunities out there.

Dwight Stoltzfoos milks near Kinzers, Pennsylvania.

Parker Beard

The backbone of our herd has been Jerseys for my entire life. Back in the early 1990s before I was born, my parents were milking Holsteins but bought a herd of Jerseys from a neighbor in order to expand after they built the milking parlor. For one winter they had to milk the two herds on separate farms, which meant they received a milk check for the Holstein herd and one for the Jerseys.

Although my dad has few fond memories of the unsustainable chore routine that winter, I remember him repeatedly and fondly telling us that the Jerseys gave much less volume than the Holsteins but the two milk checks were virtually the same. That unexpected discovery must have made quite an impression on all of us, because we have been selecting for components over volume ever since.

Over the years, however, we have experimented with so many breeds that an apt description of our herd is to say they are colorful brownish mutts. Some of the breeds we have used in addition to Jersey include Dutch Belted, Norwegian Red, Kiwi, New Zealand Friesian, Red Devon, and Normande. We have found that many of our best cows are 75-90% Jersey crossed with something else. What makes up the remaining 10-25% doesn’t seem to be too critical as long as it is there.

After a number of years of keeping pure Jerseys as replacements we

realized that selecting for increasingly smaller statured animals had reached a limit. Milk production and cull values were closer to the expected range for goats than cows. For the past few years we have crossbred over half of our herd, aiming for slightly larger framed animals that will (hopefully) achieve better production and body condition, be more winter hardy, be more valuable as culls and still maintain high components from the Jersey base. We certainly still favor a smaller cow that can walk long distances and handle rough terrain, as it is not uncommon for the milking herd to travel three miles per day including some sizeable hills.

Thinking about answering this question has motivated me to scrutinize our cows and I have noticed they generally fit into one of three groups: cows that milk well but sometimes struggle to maintain body condition, cows with low production but great condition, and cows that have consistent production and good body condition. This third group represents our best cows, but it is not immediately clear why they are different.

I suspect that it is a combination of the breeding choices we make alongside the adaptations to our system that individual cows pass on to their daughters. Each successive generation of heifers since we stopped feeding grain seems to be better adapted to our farm than the last. While our cows and our management of them have lots of room for improvement, it has been encouraging to look back and recognize we have come a long way since we stopped feeding grain seven years ago.

Parker Beard milks near Decorah, Iowa.

Alvin Lambright

I think every breed has cows that excel in grassfed production, so maybe focusing within a breed is more important than focusing on a breed. However, my experiences have only been with the Holstein and Jersey breeds.

We started with all Holstein heifers when we started milking cows, but when we finally found an organic market (local cheese company), we had to sell our Holsteins and buy Jerseys to get on the truck, which we did reluctantly because we had no experience with Jerseys. It did not take us long to find out that less milk does not necessarily mean fewer profits if you have high components. Plus, how much a cow eats to make the same amount of money is a huge factor.

So what breed and type of cows is best? Like in all farming circumstances, it all depends! However, this is what we are finding out works best for is. At first we thought we wanted a cow that is a little beefier looking. But we are finding out that too often those cows that stay fat like a beef cow are just that, a beef cow, and don’t milk a whole lot. We as grassfed milk producers should remember we are still in the business of producing milk.

As our forage and management gets better, we are finding out that it is not as hard to keep condition on cows while still producing modest amounts of milk and getting cows bred. We want a cow that is able to milk the fat off her back that she gets late lactation and during the dry period. We treat our dry cows like a hog we are fattening for butchering. They get heifer feed for the first two weeks after dry-off until her udder is down, and then she goes back in with the lactating cows.

How should a cow look? Here is what I look for in a dairy cow. First of all, big or little, I want her to have plenty of spring of rib. That means she can fill up with forage easily to the point where she almost looks like she’s bloated, but her ribs can expand so she doesn’t bloat easily. I want her front legs wide apart and straight, a nose with big nostrils, a wide escutcheon, and of course an udder that is even with all four teats spaced evenly apart and pointing straight down. I don’t think the size of a cow matters as much as how she’s built. Our biggest Jersey is just that, and she’s ready for her ninth lactation.

So, how important is it for a cow to be built right and be efficient at converting forage to milk? We do monthly DHIA to track our cows individually. This has really helped us know which cows are truly profitable or not. I will try to explain in my humble farmer-without-a-college-degree figuring. I am going to take the Holstein and Jersey breed to compare because they seem to be at the opposite ends of milk production and components. There are of course lots of variables, but I will take a couple of scenarios and just compare components, milk production, and feed cost, not accounting for milk volume pricing and hauling cost.

Using the higher end of grassfed production I’ve seen, let’s say you have a Holstein herd where the cows weight 1,300 lbs. on average, milking 50 lbs./day at 4% butterfat and 3% protein and you’re getting paid $4/lb. for butterfat and $3/lb. for protein. That means you have 2 lbs. butterfat per cow for $8, and 1.5 lbs. protein per cow for $4.50. That’s a total of $12.50 per cow per day without quality premiums and all that.

Then you have a Jersey herd weighing 1,000 lbs. on average, milking 35 lbs./day at 6% butterfat and 4% protein with the same prices as above. That means you have 2.1 lbs. butterfat per cow for $8.40, and 1.4 lbs. protein per cow for $4.20, for a total of $12.60 per cow per day without quality premiums.

Now here is what I think is the single biggest factor of profitability in grassfed dairy. If cows eat 3% of their bodyweight in dry matter, a 1,300-lb. Holstein will eat 39 lbs. DM a day and the Jersey will eat 30 lbs. Let’s say you’re buying dry hay for $300/ton as fed, or roughly $0.18/lb. DM. The Holstein costs you $7.02 per day to feed and the Jersey costs you $5.40 per day, for a difference of $1.62 per head per day.

So, am I trying to say one breed is necessarily more profitable than another? No. What I’m trying to say is no matter what breed of cows you have, you have to know what your cows are doing compared to how much forage they consume.

If you have big cows that consume lots of forage with low components, you should be getting lots of milk. If they eat a lot and have low components and you don’t get a lot of milk, that’s when the struggle for profitability starts. It’s the same thing if you have smaller cows that eat less and give less milk: you should have high components to get a higher milk price to make up for less cwts. When you have less milk and low components, that’s when it gets harder to make a profit.

Alvin Lambright dairies near Wolcottville, Indiana.

Ervin Barkman

Our herd used to be purebred Holsteins. In 2006 we started to breed to Jerseys — some New Zealand and some American. We asked ourselves, “what do we do next after these crosses?” So we started with Norwegian Reds, some Swedish Reds, Shorthorn, and a few Dutch Belted.

They say the three-way cross is a good cow, and that is what we decided to try. Our mix was Holstein, Jersey, and Norwegian Red, and they did very well for us. We had 14-year-old cows. In fact, we just sold a family cow that was 14 years old and still going strong. In the last five years we did some aAa mating, but now we’re leaning more toward bull breeding.

The type of cow I like to see is a little short-legged, overall wide, and 1,000-1,200 lbs. I want to see them over all round and robust. Instead of keeping the three-way cross, six years ago we started breeding Fleckvieh and we really like these cows. They keep body condition well, breed back well, and the weight gain on calves is phenomenal. Fleckvieh would also be a good choice if you are feeding grain.

We can breed the best grass genetics, but if we don’t raise the calf right, those genetics won’t mean much. I was told one piece of the pie is genetics and the rest is management. We are hearing more and more about building your herd with what you have and selecting bulls from your best cows, which is called epigenetics.

Ervin Barkman milks cows near Fresno, Ohio.

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