Good evening everyone, and thank you for joining us for tonight's BCVA webinar. My name is Sarah and I'll be chairing the webinar tonight. Our speaker Mike is happy to remain online for questions, so please type any that you may have in the Q&A box during the webinar, and I'll save your questions for the end of the presentation.
If you have any technical difficulties, please let us know by using the Q&A box, and we will do our very best to assist you. If you can't see the Q&A box, if you move your mouse, then the taskbar should become visible at the bottom of the screen. So it's my pleasure to introduce Mike Steele as our tonight as tonight's speaker.
Mike graduated from Bristol Vet School and worked in mixed practise before returning to Bristol as a lecturer. Whilst there, he developed a five-year course in evidence-based veterinary medicine, which became the basis for our CVS's knowledge summaries. In 2010, he joined Elanco Animal Health as their global ruminant consultant in 2018, during which time he launched Keckstone and in Restor.
Experience in industry allowed him to develop his skills in R&D and work on large herd projects with global partners all over the world. Now Mike runs his own dairy consultancy business, Inspire Cattle Solutions, and is the technical director of Micron Bio Systems. So tonight, Mike will be sharing with us how to show value from advice, a Toyota process.
So now to hand over to Mike. Thank you very much, Sara, and good evening everyone. As Sara said, my name's Mike Steele and you'll have my contacts at the end of the webinar and feel free to contact me as well by email or text, mobile, those will all be displayed at the end of the webinar.
So thank you for joining. And tonight's webinar is going to be about how to show value from advice. Now it may seem a little odd to have, Toyota in the title, but, the process that I'm going to show you actually belongs to Toyota, and they, they begun this process, many years ago.
So If we go on to the next screen, that's not happening. There we go, aims for this workshop, so. What we're going to do this evening is to start to understand how to focus on a customer need.
So it's all very well for us to have an aim when we work up a problem on a farm, but, whether or not that actually is what the customer wants is another issue. So we're going to have a look at how to focus down and ask the customer what they want. Then we're going to start to understand what value actually is and where value comes from when we're dealing with a problem on the farm.
Then what we're going to do is work through the problem in a process manner. So none of this is probably very different to what you do already. However, if we follow a consistent process and record this consistent process, it can make us a lot more efficient and make us, make it a lot easier for us to charge for advice and actually value advice at the end of the day.
So we're going to work through how to work through a problem. So that begins with a problem statement. So that's what the problem is.
And then we're going to look to see what's causing the problem and then how we can really focus on a project to fix that problem in order to relate back to the need and only then can we look at value. So that's what this is, it's a cycle, it's about understanding needs, recognising where value is, and then trying to fix something on the farm in order to show that value back. OK, yeah, so why Toyota?
So I was trained on this process by General Motors around, probably around 6 years ago now. And, they, the guys that trained me, were trained by Toyota. Now, Toyota train other institutions now because they're so good at it.
They've been doing this since the 1950s. So for around about 70 years. And they think that they're so efficient now that probably no one's going to catch up with them.
So they teach other people how to do this, and it's really, really useful. I wish I'd known this when I was in practise 20 years ago. It would have made my life a lot easier, I think.
So what Toyota do is every employee from CEO down to the people that sweep the floors do this process. It's called A3 or it can be called lean processing or it can be called kin or sometimes A3 thinking. We'll talk this through in a minute, but it's not really complicated.
It's really just. You can summarise this process and you can put that on a piece of A3 paper, so hence A3 thinking, because everything can fit on an A3 piece of paper that can then be shown in the place where the problem occurred so that anybody can go along and pick that up and see how we fix the problem and where you can improve it in the future if it's still happening. So hence that's why it's A3 thinking.
So many organisations use this now, and the guys that had trained me from General Motors had just come from Chicago Hospital, Chicago General Hospital. I was taught in the US when I did this, and, some poor nurse in Chicago Hospital, was going to be fired. Because, she'd done a wrong ECG trace on a patient and the doctor that looked at the ECG, ECG trace thought this was pretty dangerous, and, the nurse had done it, so therefore, she was responsible.
So fortunately, she'd been trained by these guys from General Motors, and she went through this process and saved her job because it pretty clearly shows that it's nearly always not people that cause problems. It's something to do with the process that causes those problems. So that's what we're going to do this evening.
And it it changed the way I do practise, and I hope it will give you some clues as to how to change the way you do too. So as always, our customer is the animal. We are vets, so we have to make sure that whatever we do, hopefully will improve the animal, improve the farm and doesn't compromise welfare, that's the bottom line.
So as a vet, that's our responsibility. But we also have another customer, and that's the one that pays our bills. And that's the one we really need to show the value to in order to justify .
Price tag. We, we really need to go away from a transactional way of thinking and go to a prevention way of thinking, but it's quite hard sometimes to actually put your hand out and collect some of that money and get the customer to actually be happy and thankful for the job that you've done. And that's all down to the value that you show.
So we're now going to have a look and see what some of that value is. Now, sometimes, I don't know if you're familiar with this, fortunately, this picture isn't from the UK, it's from a farm I was in in the Czech Republic, but, unfortunately I have been on farms like this in the UK, so, . I'm sure you have to, and I'm sure it's been through your mind, many, many times on what you can do to change that.
I'm sure you've mentioned it to the farmer. I'm sure many other people that visit the farm also look at this situation and think something has to change. But the farmer hasn't done it, and he's probably been told for quite a long time.
The question is, why? Why hasn't he changed it? So at this point, I usually, when I do this workshop, I actually get answers from the audience.
So I'm just gonna come across with some of the ideas. That, OK, sometimes he's reluctant, he often says he hasn't got the money, but quite often he says he hasn't got the time to do anything or the labour. So there's lots and lots of general causes that you put in place, but really it's down to.
What's in it for me. He hasn't actually seen what is in it for himself to change that situation. So, perhaps we need to change the question that we're asking.
So I call this the Tinkerbell question. And many, many times as vets, we want to go, we see a problem, and we love to give solutions. So we say, there's your problem.
OK, here's your solution. I've got something that can fix that. And whether it's DA, ketosis, you come straight out and say, I can fix that.
I know how to fix ketosis. But Then you find that 3 months later, when you've done your herd report, and you've put that in front of the farmer. Really 3 months later, nothing's happened and nothing's improved.
And There's another way to ask. And one of the things that I do is I ask a magic wand question. If you had a magic wand that could change one thing on your farm, what would it be?
And you're really quite surprised by this answer. When I first started doing this, all I expected to happen was the farmers would just say, I need to make money, just make me money. Or give me return for my investment.
But actually it's really not. When you're actually sitting down with a cup of coffee, hopefully, and you're chatting about these things. It's something else.
And it can be quite surprising. The first time I did this, the farmer actually came out quite openly and said, what he really wants is his wife to stop asking him to . To Try and find some time on a Sunday to help her out with the children.
He didn't have any time, and he actually wanted to spend that time with his children. But he said I don't have this time because I spend it fixing sick cows. So what I did is I said, well, why are they sick?
And he said, well, come out and have a look. So we went round and had a look around the farm, and sure enough, he had some pretty sick cows. He had very high instances of meteritis, and he's.
Close up, dry barn was pretty dirty, needed some attention, the cows needed some more feed space, and they needed more chopped fibre in the feed. So we had a look at that and after we finished the project, we actually showed that he had 12,000 pounds more money after three months from a lack of disease and more milk, but that really didn't raise his eyebrows. What we actually did at the end was say, well, how many hours do you now have on a Sunday?
And he said, Actually, do you know what? I had about 6 hours last Sunday. I could spend it with the children and the wife could go out, and she spent some time riding a horse.
She was happy. I was happy, the kids were happy. And that meant everything to him.
That's what he was thankful for. So sometimes it's just a question you have to ask. OK, so now you've established what value actually is going to be.
It's worth time. Understanding the value chain. So I'm gonna use a milk example because I'm a dairy consultant, but you can use this in any other value chain on a farm or even in small animal, in fact.
But this particular one, we've got to get cows pregnant, so there's reproduction involved. Then we've got to feed the cows, then we've got to harvest the milk, and then we've got to sell the milk. Now there are many steps in that process.
But whenever we're looking at a value chain, there are very few steps in that process that actually create value, as in monetary value, at the end of the process. So when I do look at this. The only thing that really creates value with reproduction is shifting 21 day pregnancy rate.
All of the other things, straws, AI, drugs, nitrogen for, for storing straws, calving labour equipment, abortions, all of those things are costs and time, and they, they take time. They're all needed, sadly, in getting a cow pregnant, but they don't produce value at the end of it. So there's only one step there that really produces value.
Same thing with feeding. I'm gonna argue it's actually the forest the forage that's harvested and the straights and mixing that actually produce value there. They're the things that are gonna drive milk volume.
Then you've got a milking parlour with lots and lots of things there that you're actually doing to harvest milk. But very few of those really are creating value at the end of it. What you're getting paid for is the milk that's shipped from the farm.
So you'll notice I did not put milk harvested as one of the value parts of the chain because that's not the same as milk shipped. So milk harvested, obviously you've got some milk that you have as antibiotic milk that you can't put in the value chain. So only milk shipped produces value.
OK, so once you've understood the value chain, you can now start to focus down where you're going to look at your project for fixing problems on the farm. OK, so we've established a need, we've established some value, and we're now going to look at the A3 process to see how we can change some of that need and create some value from it. I took this picture simply because this is when people really value what they do.
This is a farm that I saw in the base of Andorra, it's in Spain. And it's in the Pyrenees, it's called Blanca. And the consultant here is Alex Bach, a really good consultant.
The, farm is owned by Ponderosa Holsteins for genetic, selection. But what they actually really value is their milk. And you can see this, the first thing you do when you drive up onto the farm are these shiny new bulk tanks with all glass around them, and at night they're lit up.
So that's a farmer that really values his product. And if you've got someone that values something, then they're going to invest in it and they're really going to, they're really going to nurture that. So trying to get what that need is, is an absolute key.
So you may have seen this many times before, I would imagine, and it's called Plan do Check Act. It's a sequence of events and it's a part of the A3 process. So 90% of our time is spent in the plan stage.
You then carry out a project, you then check to see what's happened, and then you can establish that as a standard operating procedure. It's a cycle, so things can always be improved or sometimes it doesn't work. So you have to go back and start again and try and fix it another way.
But it's a cycle and it's a process that's creating value, but it's not a one way linear process. OK, so it has a structure. Now, as I said, 90% of this is in the planning stage, but it has around about 10 steps, and we're going to go through these this evening.
So it all starts with a problem. And if we've got a problem, then we have to state and define clearly what that problem is. And it's actually a lot more difficult than you think to create a problem statement.
It's a bit of a skill and it takes some time to get this right and after one or two times of doing this, you will get better at it. But, quite a lot of the time, the problem that you, the problem statement you come out with at the beginning. It's not really the problem that you end up with down here at your goal.
So it's always worth rechecking it later. But anyway, we're going to talk about how to build the problem statement. Then we're going to talk about how to take a background.
This is really the clinical history. Then we're going to look at the current situation. And then relook at what our goal is, so this is going back to the problem statement, as I said.
Does it need some fine tuning here? We're then going to go through root cause analysis. And then we're going to check our root cause by asking why.
We'll go through all this later, but this is part of the process. Ask why that root cause is in place. And when you've done that, you've checked your root cause and you've established that that probably is the highest risk factor to causing your problem.
We've then got a target situation to fix. We're going to get some countermeasures in place to fix the target situation. And then we're going to do the main part, which is the project.
We're going to run a project to fix this problem. And then we're going to follow it up by rerunning the current situation and to gather the differences between before and after. And only now can we look at the value.
Only now can we show what those differences were and whether or not that relates back to the customer need in the first place. And if it's worked, then we can act to make that a standard operating procedure. If it hasn't worked, we can go back to the root cause analysis and we've done 90% of the work already.
We just have to change what we do and go back to the beginning again. OK. So I'm sure you're all familiar with this guy.
It's a frustrating programme to watch because what happens every week is they do not do this process. You'll see what I mean later. What they actually do is they go, go straight from a problem into a solution, and they don't establish a root cause or an established process.
So the following week, they start the thing again, and they still don't fix the problem, and it goes on like that, like Groundhog Day. That's why this programme quite frustrates me because once you've done this, you can, you can. Let's say, almost guarantee yourself a place as Lord Sugar's apprentice.
So let's have a look and see how we can do this. Say the problem. What, what Toyota did at the very beginning is they started to look to see why batches of cars were recalled from a production line.
And in one case, there was just one screw that was placed wrongly. And the immediate reaction for a company is to find a worker that put the screw in the wrong place and say right, you're fired. But if we do that, what have we got to do?
We've got to recruit another worker. We've got to train that worker. We've got to put them in that situation again, and they may well put that screw in the wrong place once again because we haven't fixed the real problem.
And the real problem may be in the plans. Perhaps it was in training. Perhaps the instructions were wrong, the procedure was wrong, there was a problem with the, with the sheeting.
Perhaps there was a problem with the machine that put the screw in place. I don't know. But one of those other things is wrong and it's very high risk to fire the worker.
So what we need to do is change the process and then we can make the whole thing a lot more efficient. Now you can see where I'm going here and I'm going to ask the audience at this point to think about the number of times you've done a herd health plan. So The number of times I did a herd health plan was extremely often, I can tell you that.
And I left these herd health plans on the farms and what they did is they converted data. Into some information. So what they did is they looked at mastitis data, for instance, they created some nice graphs and mastitis and then we'd say, OK, we want to make mastitis less in the future, we'll try and improve the drying, drying off process.
We tried that But really, 6 months later, 9 times out of 10, it really didn't change. Because we didn't go through the proper cycle of data to information. You then need to convert those graphs to knowledge.
So we now need to look at the root cause. And once you've got the knowledge, you can find the solution. So that's what this is about and we can make our advice a lot more valued.
So let's look at a problem statement. So what a problem statement needs to be is smart. So it needs to be specific.
It needs to state where we're at right now. Over how much time it's been going on, this problem. And then we need to say versus what we plan to do in the future.
So what's a realistic goal? So if we've got a percentage of incidents. Let's say prevalence actually, if we've got a percentage prevalence right now.
We can convert that to an incident because we've looked at it over a specified time. We can then look to a goal where we need to be in the future within a specified. Time itself.
And you can actually extend that to say how much money you might save or what might happen to welfare if we change that. So, I'm now gonna transport you to close to where I live. I live in Buckinghamshire and I went to a farm earlier on this year.
And this is a real case. The farmer was in his 50s, his son in his 20s, very, very keen guy, his son, which is quite a rare thing to have. They had a nice cafe selling the milk on site, so they had value added sales.
So they were getting a little more than the, national average per litre. Had 180 cows, twice a day milking, with seasonal calving and grazing from April to October. So that's the kind of farm that we had.
And this is what I saw. So I was actually there to do something completely different. I do quite a lot of these presentations, and I was there to get a video of a cow carving normally because as a vet you're always looking at carvings that don't happen normally.
So I needed a video of a, a cow that was carving normally. When I arrived, the vet for the farm also arrived at the same time I just happened to be there. And she was coming to her routine, PD.
And she came out, she had her ultrasound goggles, all the equipment, walked straight past me, obviously said hello, walked straight past me, straight past the dry cow shed, straight past the late lactation shed into the parlour where she did her PD list. Treated PD negative cows, saw some cysts, if you believe they exist, then, that's a bit controversial, but, that's another workshop for another day. OK, but some anti-stress cows.
She saw some endometriosis cases. She treated those. And after about 40 minutes, she left with a smile and a wave.
And that's what I used to do, and that's what many, many vets I see do on a daily basis. The nutritionist didn't really talk to the vets. They were left there at the same time.
And the nutritionist, I found out from the farmer afterwards, never really got his boots on and just looked at rations on the computer. OK, sounds familiar. I hope it does, and in a way, I hope it doesn't.
OK. So after she left, the farmer said to me, after, after a while, he'd watched me, he'd watched this, this calf coming out, giving it the colostrum, and, he said. Do you know, I had 6 cases of DA in the last few months.
And I don't know how long I can carry on. He was in debt. He was really at his wits end, but he really wanted the farm to carry on so he could pass it on to his son as a viable business.
So, your thoughts, my thoughts were. There's something else going on here, but I'd had the advantage of already standing watching this cow calve at the dry cow shed and watching the late lactation cows. So, this is what I saw.
So what needs fixing? Well, he's got some DAs. And we know that DAs cost a certain amount of milk, references down the bottom here from the vet record.
This is a really good reference for costing out DAs. So there is some future milk and some actual milk lost, at his milk price. This was 658 pounds a case, repo cost, and I'm not including, veterinary fees there as well.
So that's quite a considerable amount of money. So we can write the problem statement as to where we are right now, so that's 24% DAs. Costing this much a month versus a target of, let's say a realistic target of 1 out of 25 in the next 3 months.
Saving this much a month, so we're going to accept that we're still gonna have some. So is this specific, measurable, accountable, reasonable, and timely? I thought it was.
So Let's take a look. So took the clinical history. I've told you the type of farm it was, it was indoor but outdoor in the summer.
180 cows twice a day milking. Seasonal calving average 9100 litres per lactation. So carving interval.
I hate to use this term, but it was 450 days pretty appalling. But, 21 day preg rate, I can tell you now was roughly around 15%. So The next place the Japanese say is to go to the gemba.
Now in Japanese geba means the situation or the site where the problem happens. So this is where you have to get your boots on and what I do is I take myself, my boots, a tape measure, a camera phone, and I usually have a temperature wind metre as well that does temperature humidity index, which is always quite handy. I don't usually take much more than that, to be honest, so I don't have a car full of equipment.
I just have that when I go onto the farm. So you can walk around, you can look at the buildings, feed, water access, docking density, you can look at bedding, you can look at body condition scores, all the sorts of things that you can do when you walk around the farm. You've got your eyes, your ears, and a really cheap and limited amount of equipment.
You can then go and look at the data. So you've got access to the dairy data system and you can have a look at the the milk, 3 or 5 day milk first service concept and risk, preg risk. And the disease events.
This farm didn't measure the HPAs or niches. But they did do body condition scoring. I'm not saying they did much about it, but they did do body condition scoring, OK.
This was the silage face. If you can see my cursor here, then you can see some pretty awful silage. The farmer, to be honest, he did have a lot of issues in collecting the silage that year.
So he didn't compact it very well. It was very wet when he got it in. You can see quite a lot of runoff, or I saw quite a lot of runoff after this.
The tops. Have a lot of blackness down here. The sides did too.
You can see some mould along the top there. He didn't use inoculants. You can see some mould on the maze clamp as well.
Again, no inoculants used there and quite, quite a rough job as well. OK. This was the dry cow shed.
And these girls were competing for the roly-poly contest. 70% of the cows were over 3.5 and a lot of those were 4.5 and creeping up to this girl, 5, they were pretty fat cows.
This is the dry cow sheds, the late lactation shed was, averaging around 3 to 3.5. So they were coming in.
These were close up dry keels, by the way. OK. Now I'm going to show you what I saw when I was videoing the carving.
While I was doing that, these are the late lactation cows and I'm then gonna show you a video. It's in two parts. This is the late lactations.
Then I'll show you the dry cows. And I want you to also look to see how keen these cows are at. Coming up to eat.
So OK, so when you were looking at that, I think the first thing I saw was those late lactation cows were not very keen on eating. That's not the kind of behaviour when cows put their noses, stuff their noses into the feed and, and shove it around because they're happy to get in there. That was not a keen cow eating.
She didn't like what she saw. The dry cows as well, I can tell you that by the time I left this farm, which is about 40 minutes later. That trough looks like this.
So it looked like there was just pure straw in that trough. They were sorting fibre like nothing else. So these cows were getting basically just the high concentrate and forage part of that ration.
They, they weren't eating that fibre at all, hence, putting on lots and lots of weight in the dry period. OK. So you might have some more thoughts at this point.
Is there anything else you want to know? What do you want to find out? What other measurements could you take?
What would you like to ask the farmer at this point? And when you go home, What evidence do you want to find? Sara did mention that I'm a bit of a freak on evidence-based veterinary medicine, so, I would go straight in there and start looking at, ketosis instances, prevalences.
I would look at, correlations between ketosis and DA. I would look at my risk, ratios of some of those other diseases as well that you were seeing. So, endometritis, ketosis.
PD negative, looking at reproduction in ketosis, I would capture as much potential value as I could from ketosis. Because that's what these cows have got for sure. OK, so.
We now need to look at our problem statement again. So our problem statement to begin with was all to do with DAs and fixing DAs and lowering the incidence of DAs. There is an alternative.
You might now want to look at ketosis. So our problem statement, you could keep it with the DA one, or we could look at ketosis now and start measuring the prevalence of ketosis, start measuring the HBA. We know, Didier Rebuisson did a, a trial and found €257 per case of of ketosis.
That's, hyperketonemia, not, clinical ketosis. So that's 220 GB a case. And we want to.
Make that a target of whatever you think reasonable in the next few months. And that's going to save whatever that incident target you put down to. And that is going to save X amount per case.
So you can work that out to a much more reasonable problem statement. So we've now got root cause analysis. This to me is the fun part.
I love doing this bit because the Japanese have worked out that no matter what problem you have, they all come down to just 5 things. And those 5 things can be broken down into people, monitoring, equipment, management, and environment. And whether you're a healthcare worker, whether you're an aerospace engineer, you can be very sure that Boeing are looking into this right now with their planes, and you can.
Be very sure that many, many businesses right now look at these 5 things very, very closely when they have a problem in anything. So if we're looking at ketosis, we need to build this out. So as far as this problem goes, who's involved?
There's a farmer, there's a vet, there's a nutritionist. Perhaps there's other people involved, perhaps there's the mixer wagon people. Perhaps there's people that fix the equipment of the mixer wagon.
I don't know, but there'll be a whole bunch of people involved here to deal with that problem. Then there's monitoring What do we do to monitor? So at the moment we've got a dairy software system.
Is it measuring BHBA? Are we capturing as much as we can from that system? What can we monitor?
What are we monitoring right now? How are we monitoring, what system are we using? Then there's equipment, what are we using?
What equipment's used to feed those cows, what equipment's used by them to eat? What equipment are we using to monitor with? Is there a limitation there?
What about the management? What protocols are in place? What's involved with, what's involved with, the people, the daily routine, putting that feed out, pushback routines, when is feed put out for those cows, how is the mixing happening?
What are the protocols involved with that? There's all sorts of management involved there. And then there's the environment.
This is feed access, water access. If water access is not 10 centimetres per linear access per cow per day, then we're going to have issues with water access which will affect fibre intake, dry matter intake. So we need to look at all sorts of things with the environment as well.
So what you can do is you can put that under an Ishikawa diagram. So the guy that that invented this, it looks a bit like a fish bones, so you can also call it a fish bone diagram. And here it is.
You got the head of the fish here, which is your problem statement. You've got the tail at the end, and each of these management environment, monitoring people and equipment banks out here. So you might do this on a whiteboard on the farm.
And it takes as long as it takes to fill in. So this you take time on. OK.
So everybody that's involved, all these people add things onto this system. OK, so the nutritionist might have his own things to monitor, might have his own management protocols, might have his own equipment. The vets would have their own version.
The farmer has his own version. So there's all sorts of stuff that you can add on to that. And that may take a month to fill in.
But it's worth that investment because what we're going to do is fix this problem. We're focused on this problem now and we want to fix it. And when that's actually filled in.
This is a different problem now. This is another another one that I did. This is on increased stays open and you can see here there's all sorts of people involved.
There's materials, equipment, environment, and monitoring. OK. And What actually happens is when this is filled in.
Everybody then looks at that whiteboard, and you all agree on the one thing, on the whole of that, there's gonna be hundreds of things, but what is the one thing that you agree that is the maximum influencer to that problem? In this case, there were 2 actually, and it was communication. That was the, the one thing, but it was 2 things and it was the communication between the AI person and the oestrogen detection person.
And acting on the results in that time. It turned out that the guy that saw Eastres. His wife was sick and he'd see cows on Easter.
He'd, but his wife was sick and he didn't have time to tell the AI guy to serve the cows in time. So it turned out he was telling him he was a bit guilty and he was telling the guy about 2 to 7 days after the cows were in Ere. Hence days open were had increased to a ridiculous amount, actually, over 200.
So the farm was gonna go out of business there. And it turned out that was the problem. They just needed to increase their communication or train up the Eastrift detection guy to do AI.
Or the other way around. OK. So it's worth mapping out root cause analysis like that and spending the time to find what that root cause is.
When you've done that, you can check the root cause by asking why. OK, so, in Japanese they say 5 wise, but 5 doesn't mean 5 in Japanese. It means Several, so it's as many whys as it is and you just go down through asking why until you can go no further.
So in this case, DAs had increased, why? Ketosis had increased. Why?
Cows were at high risk, they were at high body condition score in late lactation in the dry period. Why? They were eating too high an energy diet.
Why? They were able to sort the fibre. Now you could take that even further, you could say, well why?
Why were they sorting fibre? Well, it wasn't being chopped properly. Why?
Perhaps there was a problem with the blade in the in the TMR mixer. Perhaps they weren't spending enough time mixing it. Perhaps you can go down the wis until you go no further, basically.
But when you've got that, you've got something you can fix. OK, and you should be able to do that both ways, why and because, so you can go down and you can go back up again. So now we've got a target situation, we've got something we can fix.
We want to turn from. Cows with ketosis getting sick and the farmer not having any time to spend with his children. We've got fat cows.
We need some more fibre in the diet, we need some more eatable fibre, and we need that body condition score to come back down to a nicer body condition score, and we need ketosis to go back to its desired state, which is as little as possible. So we need to put some countermeasures in place. And in this case, there were some clinical countermeasures and there were some nutritional countermeasures.
So clinically we want to do some stuff and nutritionally we want to do some stuff as well. So I would suggest your list may be a lot longer than this, but at the very minimum, what we need to do is do some body condition scoring. We need to find out where we're at right now, at carving and at first service and at dry off.
We need to measure first service conception rates. We need to measure metritis, ketosis, DA. If we've got pedometers, we could look at some of those, we could look at line times, we could look at feed times, feet, pushback frequencies, we could look at feed access, water access, measure daily milk volumes as well.
OK, nutritionally. We need to evaluate the rations to make sure it's optimised for energy. We need to use perhaps a pinstate sieve or something to really look at those chop lengths to make sure we're getting it right.
Fix the blade on the mixer. We need to make sure it's not suitable. Make sure they've got a bit more water.
And perhaps major milk fat percentages as well, that might help us monitor too. Now, I'm going to go back for a second and I'm going to go back to our herd health plan. And the bit that was missing from my herd health plans when I did this, the reason why we had mastitis that went on and on and on, and it sometimes got better, sometimes didn't, is because what we didn't do.
Was make people accountable. This is Responsible, accountable, consultable, and informed. A racy chart, otherwise known as who does what by when.
So we need to map that out. We're going to have a project. We've got a date when we need the ketosis to be fixed by.
We've, we've said 3 months. And what we need to do is the vet needs to do something, needs to train the farmer on body condition scoring. We need to get the vet to take some blood samples.
We need to get the vet to record diseases. We need to evaluate line times. Sometimes maybe the nutritionist might do this, but the nutritionists had a bunch of things to do to fix and the farmer has a bunch of things to do as well.
Some of that needs to be done by a certain time as well, so we need to do this by next week. We need to coordinate it all and make that accountable. What helps this through as well is have an accountability call.
And the great thing these days is that this is very different from when I was in practise on farms 10 years ago. When I used to rely on a whiteboard by the kettle, and everyone just putting things on when they arrived and looking at the whiteboard on their next visit. What we've got now is great things like WhatsApp, Facebook.
We can have groups where the farmer, the nutritionist, the vet, and everyone on that farm can have a WhatsApp group for this project. So now we can take a picture of those cows. We can take a picture of the fibre.
We can take a picture of, of that whiteboard and the root cause fish bone, and we can share that through the group. And we can make that accountable and have a call each Friday at a certain time and make sure everyone's doing that racy chart. And that accountability call doesn't need to be pointing fingers.
What it needs to do is actually say, well, if you haven't done it, who needs some help? How can I help? It's a group team help call.
It's not really, pointing fingers and saying you're not doing your job properly cool. And that gets a lot more buying. OK, and then.
Creating the value is reasonably easy. It's actually just a matter of at the end of the project, going through that data again and establishing what that value was. So hopefully we fixed ketosis.
But what was our need in the first place? Our need was the farmer. Want some more time with his kids.
Measure that Measure what was actually wanted in the first place and we've got some value that the farmer actually won't mind paying the bill at the end of it. Because that's actually relevant to him. And I find that works almost every time if we actually ask that Tinkerbell question in the first place.
Seeing as we've got about 4 minutes before Sara says we can go into questions, then I'm gonna take us on to a little more about how to also create monetary value. So when we have a business, we've got cash flow, we've got profit, and we've got future profit. So cash flow is all about what money we've got going in and out at the moment, and this is why the farmer says, I can't invest the money.
OK, but what he's not seeing is the profit over a longer period of time. And what he certainly never sees is the future profit, which is daily compound interest. So we'll look at that very quickly.
So profit is simply a matter of yield, takeaway costs is the income over feed costs. And that includes growth maintenance pregnancy of the animals. And this is when you have a TMR fixed at a certain number of litres of milk that you want.
What if though, what if our project takes that TMR and adds an extra couple of litres? All right. So we've got a product profit is the product price, which is the milk price, we can influence that a little, but not very much.
We've got a cost of production, we can make things more efficient. Hence we can do an A3, that's all about efficiencies. We can decrease disease or increase count numbers.
And we can multiply that by the volume of the product, and this is again about decreasing disease, perhaps going to 3 times daily milking, improving feed intakes and improving rerate. OK, that's profit. Let's look at our margins.
So if we can increase our literage above the TMR average. Then that extra litre is worth a lot more money. OK, so to put that into perspective, what we, what we're doing is if we have a certain amount of feed, maintains the animal.
If we get 20 litres of milk, that takes a certain amount more feed. And that's 56% of feed is for animal maintenance. What if we get 36 kg of milk?
It takes a bit more feed, but not as much feed. As Previously, it's more efficient. It's actually only 44% of feed.
Because that extra milk only costs the energy for that extra milk. The energy for the extra milk does not have to include the growth and maintenance and pregnancy because that's already accounted for in the TMR. So the extra litre only costs 3.9% fat, 3.2% protein, and 4.9% lactose, which is 5.3 megajoules of energy.
Now that only costs around about 8 pence a litre. What the other stuff has cost is around 23 pence a litre. So if you're getting 28 pence a litre.
Then you've gone from 23 to 28, your TMR is giving you a margin of 5 pence a litre. But your extra litre has only cost you 8 pence. So actually that extra litre that you've pushed it above TMR average is worth 20 pence a litre, not 8 pence a litre, it's a lot more profitable.
OK, so when you're looking at a lactation curve, what we'd really like to do with vets is ask, why is this cow at lactation 3 giving 60 litres of milk, and this cow at lactation 3 giving 30 litres of milk. They're both in the same barn, they're both eating the same amount. Why are they so different?
And that is all to do with why we manage cows. That's transition, that could be environment, that could be feed access, water access, ketosis, you name it, everything's there. So as a vet, what we need to do is narrow that.
Range OK. That is what brings us value. If we can give that extra average up 1 litre.
That liter's worth 20 pence a litre over 3 or 5 days instead of 8 pence a litre. OK, so then we can look at that as future compound profit. If we're making 10% more in one day.
The next day we start 10% up, so we're making 10% more, which is future compound profit. Now this looks a bit ridiculous because it makes it look like we'll all be living on Caribbean islands. What actually happens, it's a bit like shares.
Management goes up and down all the time, so your profit goes up and down all the time. But the more you can stay on the positive side, the more compound profit you make. So 1 kg after 100 days, 1 kg extra can make go from 26 pounds to 57.
2 kg goes from 52 pounds to nearly 1000. 2.5 kgs, 65 days to nearly 4000 on compound profit.
Of course that's never going to happen. That's theoretical. What you're actually doing is the more profitable milk you get above average, you get future compound profit on that.
So the more positive you get, the more value you make. So what we're doing is protecting profits and that is what really drives value on your A3s. So Plan D check Act, that's a summary.
That's what the A3 can look like when you've gone through problem solving, the background, current situation, root cause, countermeasures, and the effect. And this is where to get some more information. So just go on Amazon, look for Understanding A3, 1st 33 chapters, we'll tell you all about it.
It's a really good book to use. OK. Sara, I think I'm done.
Thank you very much for listening and there's my contacts afterwards if you want to contact me by email. Great, thank you very much, Mike. That was a really, really interesting, presentation.
I'm, I'm sure it's given us all, lots of useful hints for, for giving advice in practise, and I'm certainly looking forward to seeing an influx of vets on next year's Apprentice. So we, before we go to questions, we've got time for just a couple of them. Can I just ask everyone to spare 30 seconds to complete the feedback survey that should have popped up in a new browser now?
Depending on which, which advice you're using. To watch the webinar, the survey doesn't always present itself. So if that's the case for you, just please feel free to email any feedback that you've got, to the email office at the webinar vet.com.
We do listen to your feedback, and we are increasing our numbers of, webinars next year. So, please, your feedback will be really useful. Feed into those.
If you're listening to the recording of this webinar, you can add comments on the website underneath the recording or email the at webinarvet.com. So over to our first question, we have a question here.
So when you come on to a farmer's consultant Mike, you're often brought in as the farmer has recognised that they have a problem. And wants it to be fixed. However, when you're in a vet in practise, it can actually be really difficult to initiate these conversations.
So what advice would you now give to your previous self in practise, on how to initiate these conversations? Oh, that's a really good question, actually, I like that. Yeah, what I would actually say.
I would spend at the end of my routine, the biggest tip I would do is I would actually spend 5 minutes extra just walking around the barn and watching the cows. Which is something I didn't used to do, I used to turn up, I used to do the PD list, I used to do what I needed to do and then leave. But you can find out so much more about the farm by just spending that 5 minutes extra watching cows eat, watching cows' behaviour, looking at how they're laying, all of those things.
Hopefully we're doing that anyway in our herd health review. But to do that more often can actually bring that extra little. Little opportunity for a conversation with the farmer.
And that's what you're looking for, it's looking for opening conversations. Fantastic. So maybe if you're offered a brew at the end of a routine, use it to, to walk around the cows, instead of sitting at the table, perhaps.
That's exactly it, yeah, yeah. And we've got time for one very quick. Common themes from the root cause analysis that you have done that really stand out as being the biggest problems on the farms that you visit.
Yeah, that's another really good question actually. I think probably the main ones have been exactly this, what I, what I've just gone through, that is probably the most common one, which is sorting fibre. .
And sourcing fibre leads on to so many other things, because if you've got fat cows, you've got ketosis, you've got DAs, you've got repo problems, you've got anti-stress cows, you've got so many of those things. You probably as well, got social issues with the cows in that last, last few weeks up to calving and the first couple of weeks into, Into the new lactation and that drives mastitis stress as well. So I would say it's nearly always in the dry bone.
It's nearly always something to do with the fibre or the or the rash. The other part of that, the flip side of that is, what's the most common thing I see wrong on farms? And the fortunate thing is, that the biggest opportunity I find on farms is actually linear water access.
It's a really cheap thing to fix, but hardly any farms in the whole of Europe I've ever been to have actually achieved over 10 centimetres water access per cow. Yeah, I think that would be a common, a common theme that a lot of vets, would, would agree with there. So we're actually right up to, to time there.
So I just want to, before we finish, just say thanks again, Mike, for really, really thought provoking, and practically implementable, presentation. And also to everyone that's attended, tonight's live webinar. We look forward to, to, to you joining us again next year.
We're upping our number of our webinars, to 6. They'll be every other month. In the new year, details of which will be announced shortly.
So thank you very much, everybody. Good night and merry Christmas. Thank you very much, Sarah, and thank you everyone.
Thank you.
