Calved cows are grazing by day in Kilkenny for the last week, and last night (Sunday) was the first night milking cows stayed out. There are 70 calved with 53 cows supplying to the bulk tank today (Monday), up from 30 yesterday. The first collection by Glanbia was 600 litres collected on Saturday. Official calving start date was 27 January but like most herds there were calves on the ground well before that date. Fingers crossed all is going well so far with two calf losses to report to date. The next couple of weeks will be the busy calving period as the bulk of the in-calf heifers queing up to calve down. For the last two years about 50,000 litres of milk was supplied in the month of February.

The January statement arrived from Glanbia showing a manufacturing price of 47.4 c/litre ex VAT for the December milk. A portion of the farms annual supply is in two fixed milk priced schemes and those prices came in at 41.7 c/l and 43 c/l ex VAT respectively so the market manufacturing price beat the fixed prices well.

Only 15,000 litres was supplied in December bringing the total supplied from January to December 2017 up to 1.61 million litres of milk, about 5% up on total 2016 supply.

In December somatic cell count was high so a €650 penalty on the December milk cheque of €7,600 brought the milk cheque back to €6,917. On top of this December milk cheque was the second half ‘top-up’ from Glanbia for the July to December period which came to €8,240 incl VAT for the farm. It means the total cheque for the farm in December came to €15,155.

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