The Moos Room™

00;00;11;03 - 00;00;43;05
Brad
And welcome to the Moos Room. Happy Labor Day today. It is Labor Day, a federal holiday in the United States, which is celebrated on the first Monday of September to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers in the United States. So happy Labor Day. It is also Labor Day in Canada. Canada has a Labor Day celebration, which is the first Monday in September.

00;00;43;05 - 00;01;12;18
Brad
So the US and Canada always celebrate Labor Day on the same day. And in other countries around the world. Labor day is celebrated on May 1st, which is the European holiday of May day. So may day has already come and gone. But alas, it is Labor Day in the US and Canada and we're going to talk a little bit about a new trade that came out for dairy cattle.

00;01;12;20 - 00;01;43;12
Brad
And that's milking speed evaluations. If you haven't caught up in the news yet, it's brand new. In August of 2025, a genetic selection trait for milking speed provides dairy producers with an opportunity to optimize parlor efficiency through genetic improvement. So these new evaluations came out for Holsteins. So there's genetic and genomic evaluations for males and females of Holsteins in the US.

00;01;43;14 - 00;02;13;22
Brad
And it predicts the average pounds of milk an animal's offspring will give per minute in a conventional milking system. So evaluations are expressed on a phenotypic scale with the Holstein breed average of 7 pounds per minute. So what does that mean? Faster milking cows can be selected for allowing more cows to be milked through the parlor in the same period of time, and slower milking cows can be selected against to maybe limit disruptions in milking routine.

00;02;13;23 - 00;02;42;04
Brad
We all know that slow milking cows slow things down in the parlor becomes less efficient, so maybe selecting for some faster milking animals will help provide greater parlor throughput and more efficient use of labor and facilities. So what is this information? Data was collected to support this from sensor technology in parlors across the United States. So the counts on dairy cattle breeding is the one that put out these evaluations.

00;02;42;04 - 00;03;10;15
Brad
And it provides an objective measurement tool for milking speed. So this new trait should not be confused with milking speed for Brown Swiss or Milking Shorthorn, which is based on subjective producer reports collected during type classifications. So basically you score cows classifiers. How fast a milking is this? You give a linear score from 1 to 8, with one being slow, eight being fast.

00;03;10;15 - 00;03;38;09
Brad
And that's how Brown, Swiss and Milking Shorthorn are evaluated. But here with Holstein they used inline sensors which were non robotic. There's also some other commercially available indices that are used. Genetics has one which is a robot cow index. Lac Tonet in Canada has a milking speed evaluation. And that's based on the linear score of one slow eight fast as well only in first lactation cows.

00;03;38;11 - 00;04;03;13
Brad
And there are some international countries that do that as well. It's mostly on a linear score. But in the Holstein it was from sensor data from parlors. So that gives them more objective value. Instead of trying to guess how fast or slow a cow can be. So like I said, it's based off of pounds of milk per minute, and the breed average is set to 7 pounds per minute.

00;04;03;16 - 00;04;32;17
Brad
So what does that actually mean? So example, we have a daughter of a Holstein bull with a PTA of 8 pounds, expected to milk faster than the average population. A daughter of a Holstein bull that is has a PTA of six. This means it's going to milk more slowly. So it's based on where that average is. Basically, milking speed is calculated by dividing the total pounds of milk produced in an individual milking by the total duration of minutes.

00;04;32;17 - 00;05;01;07
Brad
So it provides an accurate picture of that. So of course, in the future obviously it will be available for more breeds into the future, but it's only available for Holsteins right now and it has a heritability of about 42%. So that means that it's a very heritable trait, which makes it a good option for selection for farmers. However, it's not going to be included in the lifetime merit index of counts on dairy cow breeding.

00;05;01;07 - 00;05;29;04
Brad
So it may in the future. But milking speed has a low correlation with lifetime merit, which means that maybe there's a lot of traits in the index that are also correlated and that are providing economic value if you select for those. So what about some correlations with other traits? Well, the largest correlation for milking speed is with PTA for somatic cell score.

00;05;29;06 - 00;06;12;23
Brad
And that's 0.43. And for mastitis at -0.28. This means that there is a moderate to strong correlation between milking speed and milk yield, as and the well known antagonistic correlation between milk yield and somatic cell count. Otherwise, there is no other correlations between longevity or fertility traits. So what about variation in PTA was expected between bulls? Well, I looked at the milking speed evaluations for 5000 bulls active bulls international in the US here that have milking speed evaluations for Holsteins.

00;06;12;26 - 00;06;42;09
Brad
And they range from 5.82 to 7.82. There's actually about 2850 bulls that are less than seven and about the same that are greater than seven. So you really have to look at this to as you go through if you're willing to select for it. So if I think about some of the bulls that I've used here at our research center, the one being the top bull in the Holstein breed, and that's Gino Sauce captain, he's at 7.23, so he's better than average.

00;06;42;11 - 00;07;10;11
Brad
If you look at the variation, it assume that about 70% of the bulls have a PTA for milking speed somewhere between 6.7 and 7.3. So why should we select for milking speed? Obviously, milking speed takes into account the amount of milk produced because you don't really want to select for milking duration. Because if you have a cow that milks 10 pounds and it takes 15 minutes to milk, that's not very efficient either.

00;07;10;14 - 00;07;37;05
Brad
So you have to use milking speed as a measure of production over the time it takes to milk. For this data set. Kind of going back to where it came from. Basically, the final data set used in this research was from 165 herds, about 43,000 Holstein and Jersey cows, and included 12,000 genotyped cows. So that was the data set that was used.

00;07;37;08 - 00;08;06;04
Brad
And right now, milking speed does not include data from automatic milking system. So no data from robots were collected. So only from inline sensors in traditional parlor equipment. An example of that would be maybe a affy milk system, which we have in our parlor here at Morris. So this gives me an idea of maybe looking at milking speed in our herd and seeing what's happening in the future.

00;08;06;06 - 00;08;27;17
Brad
I'm very interested in milking speed because sometimes milkers will come to me and go, these are slow cows. We need to call them. We need to call them. So I need to look at those animals, determine how fast they're milking, what the milk production is, and really determine if I should select for slower milking cows or select against those cows.

00;08;27;17 - 00;08;56;15
Brad
And we have Holstein crossbred jerseys, you name it, here in our herd. So maybe in the future I'll be looking at that from our parlor data and see what I can find. So hopefully you got a little taste of what milking speed is on this Labor Day. And look for it in new bull proofs. Just came out in August, and I think it will be something that farmers will want to be using in their dairy herds into the future.

00;08;56;18 - 00;09;21;20
Brad
So with that, if you have any comments, questions, or scathing rebuttals, feel free to contact me in the newsroom. That's s r o m at in edu or find us on the web at U of M extension livestock or Rock dairy. And with that, Happy Labor Day. Bye.