Points to Consider to Reduce Milk Production

In situations where the decision is to produce less milk, the following are points to consider. Obviously, every farm case is different and has to be looked at independently. 

• Reduce by culling unwanted and poor quality animals- obviously a permanent result and may not make economic sense deepening on market prices for cull cows
• Reduce heifer numbers to those that are needed. Many farms with improved reproduction, improved feet and leg issues resulting from better management, along with reduced calf/heifer mortality and age at calving, often need only 7 or even 6 heifers (from birth to calving) for each 10 cows (milking an dry) in the herd. Reducing the numbers of heifers will reduce farm feed costs and save forages.
• If you are milking 3X, go to 2X and reduce milk production a small bit
• Dry off some cows early- with the precaution of not allowing them to get fat during a prolonged dry period. Limit feeding either using poor quality forage or less total dry matter per day will make this potential problem less. Keep body conditions to 3.0 to 3.5.
• Feeding higher forage diets to your herd. Since the objective is less milk production and less direct (current) out of pocket feed costs, this will be effective as long as you have available forage inventory. Culling the milking herd and heifer numbers will make this more achievable. 
• Limit feeding dairy cows. Research has been done for many years on limit feeding beef cows at maintenance and growing heifers, with great success.  Limit feeding improves feed efficiency most often, and that is why it is done.  In addition, there have been some studies using limit feeding in lactating cows. My interpretation of this data is to reduce dry matter intake by 5-15% (depending on how much less milk you wish to achieve), feed a higher forage diet if possible which will help if cows slug feed, and the result is 5 to 10 percent reduction in milk production. While producing less total milk; milk fat, protein, and lactose percent often go up. The research was done to look at making cows more efficient at producing fat and protein, while reducing methane output, but it can be used in our current situation to reduce total milk production. It is important to understand that this should be done post peak milk and post breeding as these both would be affected negatively.  Also keep in mind that when cows go down in milk post peak, that this trend is not reversable. This lower milk will persist for the remainder of the lactation, even if you increase feed it will not completely reverse. It is likely that your nutritionist does not have a balancer to do this change. Just feed the same TMR, but less of it.