Dairy Day: highlights from virtual event

Dairy Day 2020 was a very different experience to previous events. Having thousands of people under cover at the Punchestown Event Centre was never going to be a runner under coronavirus restrictions.

This year’s event was moved online with the production of three pre-recorded shows, which are available to watch free on www.ifj.ie/dairyday.

The following are some of the highlights from the shows.

Rearing increasing numbers of calves with less labour than before is a big challenge for many farmers. Is it possible to successfully rear calves with low levels of labour input and in ‘low-cost’ buildings?

To prove that it is, the Irish Farmers Journal travelled to Tipperary to meet up with two farmers doing just that. On the calf feeding side, Tom and Tadhg Butler are milking 140 cows alongside an agribusiness enterprise near Templetuohy.

They have a computerised calf feeder in one shed, but their calf-feeding system of choice is a 50-teat mobile feeder and a U-shaped gate. This allows the calves to suck from the feeder without leaving the pen or without the feeder having to enter the pen.

“It’s a one-man job. The main reason we got it made was to make life easy and improve labour efficiency. It was made by a local engineering firm and it cost in the region of €400. It’s a 50-teat calf feeder but you lose access to about five teats in the front, so you can feed anything from 40 to 43 calves comfortably. We’re very happy with it,” Tom says.

The older calves on the Butler farm have access to an open shed and a field, with the U-shaped gate located in the yard in front of the shed.

Graham Swanton is the farm manager at Miletree Farm, a large dairy business near Clonmel. Over 700 cows calve in the one yard in springtime and new calf housing was constructed over the last few years to cater for such large numbers.

If coronavirus has taught us anything, it’s about the importance of ventilation when it comes to minimising disease. This is particularly the case where there are big numbers involved. The calf sheds at Miletree Farm are purpose-built lean-to calf sheds facing each other. The sheds are long, with 18 spans on one side and 15 spans on the other, but it’s the design that stands out the most.

The shed is simple to construct, easy to clean out and provides a healthy environment for the calves. Graham puts up windbreakers along the front of the shed in early spring to provide extra shelter to young calves and protect them from heavy rain and snow, but takes them down as the weather improves and calves get stronger.

Cost-wise, the facility cost €60,000 in total. This includes the shed, concrete, penning, water and electricity

The dimensions of each pen are 16ft high at the front, 9.5ft high at the back, 20ft deep and 15.5ft wide with a 4ft overhang at the front. This gives a total floor area of 29m sq.

Graham puts 13 calves into each pen, which is a stocking rate of 2.2m sq per calf. This is at the upper end of the Animal Health Ireland (AHI) guidelines.

Cost-wise, the facility cost €60,000 in total. This includes the shed, concrete, penning, water and electricity. The concrete work was done in-house by the farm team with the help of a groundsman and one wall was already present, so these costs are not included. At €60,000 for 460 calves, the cost per calf is €130. If the shed was stocked at the lower end of the AHI guidelines (1.7m sq/calf) then the cost per calf would €100, excluding own labour. Both of these costs are a fraction of the costs of most conventional calf house designs.

Brian Hogan is a dairy farmer milking 140 cows on a 40ha grazing platform at Horse and Jockey in Co Tipperary. Brian took part in the Irish Farmers Journal advanced grassland management course in 2020. He speaks to Stephen Connolly about how improving grassland management has allowed him to hit targets.

The targets set by Brian at the start of the year include growing 16t DM/ha and producing 580kg milk solids per cow from 600kg of meal per cow.

“I checked in with these targets in mid-April, mid-July and again in the last few weeks. By mid-April, we had 1.6t DM/ha grown, which was ahead of target.

“We worked hard in the spring to get cows out to grass and, as a result, grass came back strong for the second round which started on 1 or 2 April,” Brian says.

“Grass was tight for maybe a week, but we were definitely better off because fat and protein was very good and production in general was a lot higher this spring because grass quality was better.”

Brian expects to finish up with 16.5t DM/ha grown, exceeding his target. On milk solids, he reckons that once the herd is fully dried off in the middle of December the average per-cow performance will be 565kg MS/cow, which is excellent production. The level of meal feeding is expected to be 650kg/cow.

In the summer, I aim to go into covers of 1,400kg

Explaining how he achieved this, he says: “We’ve reseeded a lot of the farm over the last seven or eight years. We’ve done a lot on soil fertility. P hasn’t been too bad here, but we’ve spread a good bit of lime and K. We’re low in K here, so addressing these two issues was the big thing.

“In the summer, I aim to go into covers of 1,400kg, which is the height of two fistfuls of grass on average. I walk the farm every Monday, maybe twice a week during periods of high growth and record the measures on the PastureBase App.”

Dairygold milk pool doubles in 10 years

The scale of the investment in milk processing in Dairygold and the need to move to value creation was crystal clear when Jim Woulfe spoke at Dairy Day.

The Dairygold boss explained that the Dairygold milk pool had grown from 700m litres to over 1.4bn litres in the last 10 years and the co-op had managed to process all milk across the four Dairygold processing sites.

Over €400m has been invested by Dairygold over the last six years to allow capacity for this extra milk.

Speaking in episode two of Virtual Dairy Day, Woulfe said: “Mallow takes in 120 milk trucks per day at peak milk, over 800 milk trucks per week and the site is working 20 hours out of 24.

“Mallow is taking in 40% of the 1.4bn litres processed in total.”