Blending cows, Christmas trees and hens into a viable business model in Dumfries

Rory Young and his family have been farming at Congeith Farms for the last 105 years. The business is divided up into 250 Stabiliser cross spring-calving cows, 32,000 free-range laying hens, 220 acres of Christmas trees and three wind turbines.

While it may sound like an odd combination that would appear as though they are separate entities, it is in fact the opposite – with each part integrated into the next.

Prioritising high fertility

For Rory, the main aim for his suckler herd is for every animal to go in calf and then to calve down in a nine-week window in spring. Currently, the figure stands at 95% and there are several management strategies that come to together to achieve that.

“We have worked hard at getting our fertility right, because, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the single most important thing in beef farming. If cows aren’t in calf then you’re not making money,” Rory points out.

The first step for Congeith is to get the bulls right.

“We rotate our bulls every three weeks,” Rory explains, “and we try to keep he ratio of cows to bulls about 30/35:1.”

They also bring in new bulls every year and no bull is kept past five years of age.

While these bulls are relied upon to bring new genetic merit to the herd, the cows also play their part. Culling on the farm is quite heavy and they regularly use 35 to 40 heifers a year as replacements.

Rory explains the emphasis placed on production records and how each cow’s historical performance is kept on a spreadsheet.

“There are a couple of things we base our culling on. Two thirds of those decisions are taken in the office looking at paper, with the last third made based on udders, feet and things like that.”

The decisions made on paper he is referring to is the percentage calf weight a cow produces relative to her own bodyweight. Each cow is accessed before a herd average is taken, and from there anything in the bottom 10% is considered for culling. By removing the lower-performing cows or the excessively heavy cows the farm hopes to raise its averages.

Of the calves produced, all stock is sold as 18-month stores, bar one third of females that are used as replacements and another third sold as bulling heifers at a year old.

Perfecting out-wintering

For the last 15 years, Congeith has out-wintered all its cows bar the maiden heifers, first-time calvers and older leaner cows. To do so, Redstart is grown, a brassica hybrid of kale and forage rape.

Rory explains more about the two main reasons for this: “Firstly, it’s from a costsaving point of view. It depends on the quality of the crop, but I would say it’s about half the cost of housing indoors.”

The second reason is as a reseeding tool. A field will generally be used for two years as outwintering ground and because land in the area can be high in granite stone, it cannot be ploughed. Instead, the cows act as the cultivation tool.

To establish the crop in early July, following a correction of soil fertility in late June, ground is sprayed off before being disced and direct-drilled with Redstart and either triticale or forage rye. The standing crop is used to provide roughage in the diet, rather than leaving bales of straw in the field.

Cows will be moved to the area in mid-November, where they will be strip-grazed in groups of 40 to 70 for the next 125 days, until calving. Each acre of Redstart will be able to sustain two cows over this period.

“The secret,” says Rory, “to getting maximum utilisation from the crop is to strip-graze it over as wide a feeding face as possible. That ensures none will go to waste as cows do not trample the crop.”

In addition to the cost and reseeding benefits, Rory also attributes the lower incidence of calving difficulty on the farm to outwintering cows. In his experience, cows outwintered always have more flesh than those housed indoors and with better muscle tone. Out of the 250 calving cows, the most they’ll handle with problems in a calving period is five to eight cows.

After 15 years and a growing club root issue, the farm has had to look for new ways of outwintering cows: “This year we’ve tried taking four cuts of dry silage from a field as bales that we’re going to leave in the field. The cows are going to graze the aftermath and the bales. We’ll see how it goes this year and evaluate the success.”

A year-round Christmas

Another one of the influencing factors that pushed the farm towards outwintering is the thriving Christmas tree business. Come late October, much of the shed space is used for storage of trees and much of the labour is tied up in their harvesting: “The cows nearly become second-class citizens,” Rory laughs.

The farm grows 220 acres of trees, which equates to about 470,000 trees at any one time. They are bought in from Denmark at four years of age before being transplanted on the farm, where they’ll spend the next nine to 10 years until harvest time. Until they are four feet high they are treated as any other arable crop, with all spraying and fertiliser carried out by a tractor. However, once they pass this point, the operation becomes more specialised. Outside of the 50 to 60 thousand trees planted each year and the 25 to 50 thousand that are harvested, there’s a lot of work to be done in between.

“Every tree is touched at least three times a year for pruning, shaping and to prevent them growing too tall. It isn’t just a case of plant them and come back in 10 years’ time for harvesting, like we thought it would be at the start,” Rory says.

Laying plans

The farm is currently in the process of building a second poultry unit to double the numbers of free-range laying hens from 32,000 to 64,000.

“The poultry fits in quite nicely with the cows,” says Rory. “They need a large area to range over, but it can just be land that livestock is already grazing – barring a small area around the unit.”

The manure from the hens can then be used as fertiliser for the farm and they now only purchase nitrogen, as the chicken manure provides all the P and K required.

The farm also has three wind turbines currently used to provide energy to the grid. They are however, planning to connect up their turbines to their own farm to provide the majority of their energy needs.

“Each one produces five million kW of energy and rather than selling that to the grid at £0.05 and buying it back at £0.13 we’re going to connect it up to our own farm and try to be self-sufficient.”

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