My local historian (“the old boy”), told me that my late great grandfather established our herd, the 31st in the district, in the 1950s.

There has never been TB on the farm – at least until a couple of weeks ago, when an unscheduled test took place due to a local outbreak.

I’ll take the positive of only experiencing TB directly for the first time, while also being cautious of the new experience. When all’s said and done, I’ll just have to get on with it and panic slowly.

How did we avoid it for so long? One theory is never renting land and therefore limiting the risk of livestock-to-livestock contact, as well as exposure to different wildlife groups.

We also rear our own replacements which limits the risk, but we can’t claim closed herd status as a stock bull is purchased every year.

Ironically, we ran a flying herd 25 years ago with cows arriving from all over NI and never had a problem.

Ultimately risk was limited without being totally mitigated. Where did it come from? All the signs point to wildlife. A hotspot has occurred around the youngstock block of land, which gives some reassurance as to the source.

When something goes wrong on the farm, my first instinct is to fix the direct problem, and likewise, when TB occurs, the infected animals are removed.

Then I do some research, have a yarn with someone better informed than myself, to try and find out what went wrong and how do we stop this from happening again. This is where the TB debate needs to develop. Testing and removing infected livestock will only solve today’s problem. Unless wildlife follows the same protocols and outcomes then we can’t remove the source or reservoir in this case. It seems pretty simple to me.

Grass

September was a cracking month. Daily growth was double the 5yr average at 80kg of dry matter per hectare (DM/ha) for the month resulting in nice covers being built up and even surplus bales being made. The weather played ball and enabled this grass to be utilised.

Growth for the year is 13.3t DM/Ha to date, I think we’ll get to 14t from 170kg/ha of applied Nitrogen. The last year we grew over 12t DM/Ha was in 2021.

However, October has closed in quickly. Cows have been housed at night the last couple of weeks and may be in by day before the end of the month.

I would like to graze into November just to have something to talk about, but recent storms could wrap things up quicker than anticipated. Thankfully the extra grass grown has been utilised. Milk sales are up 8% while meal fed to date is down a third on last year, which is a saving of around 300kg/cow. Fingers crossed these figures can hold out until the end of the season.

Scale

I heard a few interesting figures this week. Apparently 18% of dairy farms run fully housed systems, producing 25% of the milk. The scale and efficiency some of these businesses have, is very impressive.

I do however wonder whether this will create a marketing issue, especially given how much we rely on the image of grazing cows to promote our products. It will be interesting to watch how this dynamic develops.