The Munster Bovine Milk Recording team hit a very significant milestone recently having milk recorded half a million cows so far in 2021.
And in a twist of fate, the milestone was reached on one of their own employee’s farms.
When they collaborated with ICBF to identify on which farm this record originated from, it happened on the farm of a Munster Bovine AI Technician Micheal Durack.
Micheal has been an AI Technician with Munster Bovine for fourteen years and milks 94 cows at his farm near Lough Derg in Mountshannon Co Clare.
Micheal has been milk recording for more than ten years and records four times a year.
He said: “Of all the things that we do here on our farm, milk recording is a really essential activity and something that we wouldn’t stop.
“Each year I go through my milk recording reports and I select my highest EBI cows that are the best performers on my farm as the dams of my replacements.”
Since 2019, the Herd Management team in Munster Bovine reports that there has been an almost 18% increase in the number of cows being milk recorded across the Munster and western territory.
The completion of 500,000 cows’ milk recorded so far this year equates to approximately a third of the dairy herd in Ireland.
Munster Bovine says that milk recording is going to play a critical role in helping farmers and the industry achieve sustainability goals in terms of reducing the carbon footprint of a kg of milk solids and decreasing the reliance on antibiotics’.
