(DHI) production and somatic cell count information resulted in a data base of health and production events from 10,742 lactations at 45 Ontario dairy herds between July 1990
and July 1993. The University of Minnesota provided dairy herd management softwarea for use in collecting health, production and culling records. A data share agreement allowed dairy
herd managers to use the software if they agreed either to purchase the software or discontinue its use at the end of a 2-yr grace period. This agreement was in place for 14 on-farm installations in herds serviced directly by the principle investigator. Veterinarians purchased the software and enrolled 25 additional herds on a bureau service. An additional 6 clients of these veterinarians employed the software on-farm, for a total of 20 on-farm and 25 bureau systems
participating in the project. Modem communications softwareb allowed the project leader to provide on-line instruction to some producers. File transfer was possible with this software, although it was designed primarily to facilitate on-line communication between 2 computers.
The DHI information was provided to producers and veterinarians on diskette or via modem. This service became commercially available in Ontario in 1992, although it had been available for a number of years in other areas of North America.
Information pertaining to disease events, stage of lactation at occurrence and therapies were recorded. Acronyms are described in Table 1. Reproductive and production performance parameters were calculated for each herd as defined in Table 2. DairyCHAMP was used as the data capture methodology because it was user friendly, had standardized event recording and performance calculation conventions, and was designed to facilitate the export of data files to analytic software