£70/ha more from cows

Getting more from your grass has been the biggest win in the Farm Profit Programme. As the programme enters its fourth and final year, the figures show that gross margin performance per cow has risen £12/head, but gross margin has jumped £70/ha.

This has largely been down to increasing stocking rates on grass and fine tuning the inputs in a rotational system. A full report is available on page 58 of this week’s paper.

Culling

Since starting in 2016, the farms have invested heavily in lime and culled their herd hard to remove underperforming cows and even those which could become under-performers.

Looking across five of the farms which had established herds at the start of the programme and comparing their performance over the three years, last year they produced eight more calves from 27 fewer cows. Moreover, cow deaths have dropped 29% thanks to earlier intervention. It is always better to get a cheque from the fat cow ring than an invoice from the knackery.

The biggest win has been on managing more intensive use of the grassland while not reverting to pouring increasing amounts of nitrogen into the spreader. Fertiliser use actually dropped from 103kg/ha to 89kg/ha. This was through smaller but more regular applications and moving cattle more frequently between paddocks.

Through better-made silage, fodder crops and treated straw, we have reduced concentrate use per cow and calf from 832kg to 789kg. In the future, changes like these will be more important as we continue to tackle climate change.

The three years have been challenging. No one predicted the summer of 2018, when fodder was tight and straw rose to £25/bale in the field, which pushed our bedding cost from £22/cow to £56/cow. We used this time to build resilience into the businesses by planting fodder crops to cheapen the winter, altering rations to use less straw and aiming for an early turnout where the land allowed.

Worryingly, the liveweight price from the market dropped 11p/kg from 2016 to 2019, but we managed to put an extra 21kg on each sold calf to maintain income levels.

Performance

Living in a world where costs are rising and market prices are falling means we must constantly refine and tweak our business performance.

Looking ahead, the benefits of the programme will continue in the coming years as the farms get better performance from their herds, increase their yields due to soil improvement and have an improved work/life balance thanks to shorter calving spreads and easier managed systems.