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The message from the Dairylink webinar on Monday night was loud and clear – animal health planning needs to be a lot more than marketing spin. It needs to be a live, working document that the farmer, the farm vet and advisers can use to make the business better.
Dairy farmer John Oliver started milking in 2015 on what he would describe as a hill farm near Limavady, Co Derry. John’s vet Keith Laughlin would describe John’s farm and the general terrain as a relatively difficult part of this island in terms of the type of weather fronts that hit the northwest coast, especially at 600ft above sea level. Many readers will be following Peter McCann’s reports on this farm on the Dairylink page each week.
The dairy farms in this north Antrim-Derry region over the last 20 years have moved to producing a lot of milk indoors and have increased herd size even before quotas were removed in the South. Vet Keith Laughlin suggests in his catchment region in north Antrim the average herd size has moved from 70 or 80 cows to 170 to 180 cows today.
The drive to increase volume per cow and herd size has led to a number of health issues that need to be managed
Interestingly, John Oliver, because he has the land available for grazing around the parlour, is moving from block autumn to block spring calving over a number of years to try and simplify the farm process and get more out of grass.
The drive to increase cow numbers in this part of Northern Ireland was driven by a need to dilute fixed costs as costs increased and the price of the end product remained fairly static. The drive to increase volume per cow and herd size has led to a number of health issues that need to be managed.
This week we hosted a webinar with John Oliver, his vet Keith Laughlin and Dairylink adviser Aidan Cushnahan on animal health planning. For anyone interested in creating or using a template for herd health planning it’s a good watch and a good template to get started with. As John Oliver and Keith Laughlin suggest, it’s all about record-keeping, knowing what you did and used last year, knowing what diseases affect your farm and making changes that might help your business rather than just adding more cost year after year.
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