What Works for Us

February 26, 2013

By: Dairy Today Guest Editor

Lambert VanderMade

Sherwood, Ohio

VanderMade Dairy LLC is a family-owned and -operated dairy

milking 1,400 cows in northern Ohio.

**Extented comments highlighted in blue.

Today’s dairy farming has changed a lot from where we were even just a few years ago. New technologies come out all the time, and it is our job to figure out which one may work for us. With all the different ways of dairying and all the different geographic areas in our country, there’s no "one fits all" approach.

We have added quite a few technologies over the years on our dairy. A few examples:

• Milk meters with conductivity readers;

• A software program that provides parlor information as well as herd health;

• A dairy-specific software program to run our books on an accrual basis;

• A software program that tracks daily feed intakes as well as inventories;