Keep every cow’s milking, breeding and treatment on her own tag record.

A herd is a set of animals, and the money sits in each one. Cow 0417 may calve on time and hold a steady yield while Cow 0422 slips on both, but the bulk tank shows only the sum of every cow, good and poor. Feed, vet bills and labour get charged to the shed as a whole.

Herd management for dairy farms starts with the tag number and builds outward. Every milking, every insemination, every injection and every bag of concentrate is written against an animal or a pen. We begin by mapping a single cow’s year, from calving to dry-off, against every notebook, whiteboard and sheet where it is recorded today.

Milking runs twice or three times a day, in a parlour or a bucket shed, and each cow’s litres are read from a meter or a jar and written down. The herd manager watches for cows that drop in yield, limp, or come into heat. The vet attends for pregnancy checks, mastitis and calving trouble, and leaves instructions about which milk must be kept out of the tank until a treatment course has cleared. One slip costs the whole load.

Feed is mixed by pen, with silage, green fodder, straw and concentrate weighed in against the number of cows in milk. Heifers and calves are fed on their own rations. Milk goes to a cooling tank, and a collection truck or the farm’s own vehicle takes it to the processor. Statements arrive later, and the farm checks them against its own tank readings. Small gaps add up.