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Martin Davin is milking 130 cows between Erril and Rathdowney in Co. Laois. Martin has been in the Teagasc/Glanbia joint programme and the farm walk held on Friday wrapped up his time in the venture
Fairly substantial progress has been made. Martin has gone from milking 76 cows when he joined the programme in 2015 to milking 130 cows this year.
But as both Martin and programme leader Richie O’Brien pointed out at the walk, it’s not all about numbers.
Making the farm more sustainable, both from a workload and income point of view were two key priorities that Martin had and he feels he has achieved both.
The amount of milk solids being produced on the farm has doubled. This has come from more cows being on the farm, but also more milk solids per cow. Last year, he produced 516kgMS/cow, up from 402kgMS/cow in 2014.
With 130 cows the stocking rate on the milking platform is 3.42 cows/ha. The overall stocking rate is 2.46 LU/ha with heifers and silage produced on an out-block.
Getting more out of these outblocks was one of the key messages from the farm walk. It was said that while a lot of the attention is placed on grass performance on milking blocks, more needs to be done to get the out-farms performing better.
Martin grew 16.6t/ha of grass on the milking block last year, but growth is back this year to a tune of about 3t/ha. This shortfall of 1tDM per cow has been replaced with bought in concentrates. Last year, Martin fed 900kg of meal per cow but this figure will be way up next year.
At a relatively high overall stocking rate, the point was made that Martin needs to get the whole farm operating like the milking block. To do so, he needs to invest more in reseeding and soil fertility on the outblocks.
Visitors at the farm walk got to see the impressive building work Martin did on the farm. He built a 140 cow cubicle shed, silage slab and calving shed along with doubling up the 12 unit parlour and building an impressive handling unit.
His next investment is to make the farm labour efficient and to improve grassland management in the spring with an underpass.
“If I had an underpass in place I could sow more on/off grazing across the road but as things stand it’s too busy and dangerous to be getting cows across the road in the dark evenings,” Martin says.
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