Robin Clements incurred a total animal health cost during 2016 of £7,939, which equates to 0.7p/l for the business. This farm is a 100% dairy stock farm with no beef animals and a total of 202 livestock units (LU) on the farm, leaving the cost per livestock unit at £38/LU.

This cost includes all medicine/ drugs purchased for the herd, veterinary intervention, vet call-out costs and hoof paring on the farm. An itemised breakdown of the total farm health cost is in Figure 1.

The preventative vaccine purchased for the herd includes vaccine for BVD, lepto and IBR. Robin also used Rotavex to reduce calf scour on the last 40 cows to calve on the farm each year.

Hoof paring is carried out by a specialist and cows are foot-bathed only when dermatitis is present in the herd.

The next two significant health costs on the farm are vet call-outs and drugs other than those purchased from a local vet, which worked out at 16% of all health costs.

The fertility work includes any intervention cost with the main milking herd. However, the majority of this cost is for pregnancy scanning and the synchronising programme used on maiden heifers at breeding.

Treatment of mastitis in milking cows takes up 9% of the health cost. Cows are treated immediately with a lactating antibiotic tube and, in critical mastitis cases, an antibiotic injection is used. Dry cow treatment is a long-acting tube plus sealer on all cows.

In 2016, 34 cows left the farm, which included 31 cull cows and three dead cows during 2016. This equated to a culling rate of 18.7% and a cow mortality rate of 1.8%. Both culling and mortality rates are low on the farm. In general, the herd has been expanding over the past five years, with the low cull rate helping build herd size. Figure 2 highlights the various reasons for cows leaving the farm, with the key reasons for culling cows being infertility followed by slow-milking cows or cows with SCC/udder issues. These cows may also have been repeat mastitis culprits within the herd.

On the farm: Robin Clements Trillick, Co Tyrone

Urea has been spread on 25 acres in February, with an additional 150 acres spread on 15 March with 50 units of urea. Some slurry has been spread on outlying land and a small area of the grazing block with low grass cover.

Conditions are still very wet here and until cows get grazing, no more slurry can be spread. Wet weather has hampered grazing so far this year on the farm. We had a few days in late February, but nothing since. If conditions persist, we will start zero-grazing to remove the winter cover and get fresh grass into cows. Growth is picking up here and my covers are high in some paddocks (see table below).

Calving finished this year on 15 January, with 75% of the herd calved by 1 November 2016. We have 57 replacement heifer calves now on the ground. A TB test closed the herd down in January. However, all bull calves had been sold before the TB test. Calf-rearing has slowed down on the farm, with calves now weaned.

Breeding started on 15 December. The pre-breeding work done before this has improved the proportion of the herd bred in the first six weeks, resulting in more replacements on the ground next year and a more compact calving profile. No scanning results yet, but cows are in good condition and the number of repeats is low.

Under the Dairylink project, herd fertility is a key focus area and we have culled specifically to improve this within the herd. Heat detection has also been ramped up, with extensive use of the cow heat monitor from NMR and my son Stephen doing all the inseminating.

Heifers have been synchronised at the start of the breeding period using an 11-day fixed-time AI programme. These heifers have got one AI straw and then housed with a stock bull.

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