Despite the lashing rain, over 100 farmers congregated at the Dairylink farm walk on David Brady’s dairy and poultry farm in Stradone, Co Cavan.
Over the past four years, David has managed to increase farm production and has double his herd size from 40 to 80 Holstein Friesian cows on his 53ha family farm.
David has also invested significantly in improving soil quality and achieving better grass growth. In the last two years, David has focused on enhancing his land value by improving drainage, soil fertility and by reseeding pastures with top-quality grass varieties.
Although investing in land and grass infrastructure has proved to be an expensive venture, the benefits have greatly increased overall farm productivity and efficiency. Since developing his land, there has been an extra 3.7t/ha of grass grown, with some paddocks having 100% more grass.
David continues to plan for further investments in land drainage and reseeding. He also plans to increase milk production and is aiming to increase cow numbers to 110 by 2018.
David intends to bring the Kiwi cross genetics into his herd in conjunction with the expansion. Jersey can be a frailer breed so he is not too keen on introducing a lot of their genetics.
“You have one chance to get more hybrid vigour into the herd and that’s in the first cross,” Aidan Brennan of the Irish Farmers Journal noted.
"Farmers should be taking advantage of hybrid vigour now as there are some good bulls out there".
Booming
David’s farm is booming at the moment. The stocking rate on the farm is low, so there is a lot of extra grass available. Nevertheless, David’s grass has been performing excellently, with autumn grass budget peak cover at 1,200kg DM/ha while Ballyhaise only reached 1,100kg DM/ha. The total growth to date has roughly been 10t but that is all to be determined by what happens in the back end.
Business plan
To conclude the farm walk, the business plan for the next two years was discussed. Without increasing the number of hectares on the farm, David hopes to increase his herd to 110. The figures indicated that overall performance was down this year, but there is plenty of scope to progress as there is a lot of potential to improve David’s protein and fat percentage in the milk. By 2018, overall profitability should be well up, all of this being done without acquiring any more land.
Having discussed infrastructure, the calving profile, getting the cows calved earlier and getting the breeding right, Conail Keown of CAFRE concluded that “to address the issue of increasing output in a profitable manner. Which is what this initiative is about. It’s not chasing output for the sake of it, it has to be profitable and the only way we can do that is to capitalise on the grass that is out in the fields and focusing on improving growth.”