Select Sires

The Importance of a
Farm Management Meeting
Transcript of Select Sires' Reproductive Moment Program
on DairyLine Radio Which Aired Aug. 11, 2005
With Ray Nebel,
Extension Specialist and Professor of Reproductive Management,
Virginia Tech

Ray, this week you are talking about the importance of a farm management meeting.

The farm management meeting is really getting the consultants around the table, getting the management team on the farm to go over current status of the farm, production, reproduction, and somatic cells, health to look at where we are now and set goals, and what we need to do to reach those goals. Of course, on the farm we need to have the owner, the manager, and the appropriate herdsman. Yesterday I actually had one of these meetings. We had three people from the farm, the herd veterinarian, and me as a consultant in there for Select Sires to do the reproductive analysis, and we also had the nutritionist.

Is it the Select Sires representative who sets the agenda for the meetings?

Well, it really depends on who is willing to conduct the meeting, and making sure we have an agenda and that flows through it in a timely order. It just happened that yesterday I was the one who set the agenda and was the convener of the meeting, and I made sure we stayed on time. But it doesn’t always have to be the Select Sires representative. It's either going to be the reproductive physiologist, or the reproductive specialist from Select Sires, or maybe the herd veterinarian that’s going to do that.

How often should these meetings take place?

It really depends on how well things are working on the farm. We have some where we go in every six months. We have some where we go in once a quarter, so four times a year. And in this case we are seeing some pretty severe problems. Right now we are going in monthly, and we’ll go monthly until we see things start to change. Once we get some recommendations in place, and see some change -- we’ll give it some time to see how that goes before we come back -- We’ll go monthly for three or four months, and then we might go quarterly and then hopefully we’ll go biannually.

The way technology is today, do you ever have meetings where you are doing web casting or things like that, or do you all just get together, is it more useful like that?

Well, face to face because a lot of things come up and a lot of times connections on the farm are not the best. However I have done one before where it was a 'Net meeting. We used a 'Net meeting software program where I was here in my office, the veterinarian was actually in another state, the nutritionist was in another state and the herd owner and managers were sitting at their computer. And with that software we could all communicate at the same time and see the responses from everyone. It kind of slows things down a little bit, but it does cut down on discussion sometimes. It allowed that meeting to occur when we were all sitting there in four different states. Of course, with busy schedules and everything we were able to get it done and it worked really well.

So, if somebody is thinking about setting up one of these farm management meetings, would they just talk with a Select Sires reproduction specialist to get things moving?

Sure. A Select Sires representative would be a great person to go ahead and get the ball moving. And again, you would have to have the herd veterinarian involved, and the nutritionist involved, but the Select Sires representative could be the one to make the contacts and set the agenda, and then really set the schedule to make sure things happen. What I did today was to make a follow-up for things to do, and I e-mailed that out and faxed it out to all parties present.

Thank you, Ray. That’s Ray Nebel of Select Sires.

Select Sires Inc., 11740 U.S. 42 North, Plain City, Ohio 43064 / Phone: (614) 873-4683 Fax: (614) 873-5751