Is the Scottish model of scale and high yields an option for Irish farmers?

Balmangan Farms is milking 1,200 cows on one of their three milking herds in a complete confinement system near the town of Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway, southwest Scotland.

As quota hasn’t been limiting UK milk output, herd size has increased and many of the large Scottish herds have turned to indoor milking and high yields per cow. Is large scale and high yields the future?

Duncan Wallace is the farm owner and boss of this operation and, since 2005, as herd scale increased, he and his team of 23 staff at Balmangan Farms have let the cows out to grazing less and less.

Grazing acres adjacent to the parlour is not a problem, as Balmangan Farms has upwards of 2,000 acres in close proximity to the milking parlour but, as Duncan said, “making enough grass silage becomes more of a priority the more cows you keep indoors and with higher yields control becomes even more important”.

“High producing cows need quality feed and conditions at all times or you start to see problems all over the place,” he said.

“Variable weather can be really difficult to manage for cows producing 50+ litres per day so we’ve taken the decision to take the weather out of the equation and put a roof over all the cows.”

In 1996, Balmangan Farm was milking 300 cows and this had doubled to 600 by 2004. Since then, there has been a steady move to indoor milking and rapid scale increases. The first modern shed to house 300 cows was built in 2010 and this was followed shortly by two more to house 300 cows each in 2011 and 2013.

Balmangan Farms is trading as a company and recent government rule changes allow a maximum of £500,000 of capital expenditure to be written off against taxable profits.

This year, Balmangan continues to invest and it is currently building a shed for a new 72-unit Boumatic rotary parlour and associated handling yards adjacent to the new cow sheds.

At the moment, all 1,200 cows are going through a 25-unit herring bone parlour, which is operating for 21 of the 24 hours each day, with cows milked three times per day and parlour is washing for the other three hours. Milking takes place at 11am, 7pm and 3am.

The new parlour will cut milking time in half for the current herd size but long-term plans could see over 2,000 cows milking on this farm.

Feeders

There are two feeder wagons at Balmangan – one for the milking cows and the other for feeding young stock.

Cows are housed in four feeding groups – fresh, high yield, mid-lactation, and low yield (near drying off).

Grass silage forms the mainstay of the forage diet and, when I called two weeks ago, the TMR mix also had 12kg of meal allocated per cow and cows were getting, on average, a top-up of 6kg of meal in the parlour (18kg of meal per cow per day).

Cows are fed to a yield of 34 litres on average and then get 0.4kg of meal per kilogramme of milk produced over this volume.

Breeding

Duncan is a cow man at heart, more so than machinery, and his focus on genetic selection is based on high milk volume.

He said: “We need a smaller, stronger type animal to survive in our system and, when selecting bulls, I look for 500kg of milk, positive for PLI life, fertility index, good, balanced performance and feet and legs – because lameness is a problem when cows are indoors all-year round.”

All milking cows are inseminated using AI and calve all-year round. The aim is to have 25 cows calving per week.

Herd manager Ryan Johnson said: “We focus hard on fertility and spend a lot of time washing out, treating and synchronising cows. Cows go on a pre-sync programme and, if they are not bred by 70 days, they go to an ovsync programme.

“Our veterinary surgeon from Galloway Veterinary Group, a member of Solway Vets, is with us every week monitoring and pregnancy checking cows to keep the focus on fertility.

“We present maiden heifers to AI at 14 months old, provided they are 350kg. They get two shots of sexed semen and we get conception rates of around 42% to first service.”

Profits

So how are profits for this industrial-type milking operation? Duncan said: “At good milk prices like we have at the minute, we can make a profit and the more scale we get, we dilute our fixed costs more and more.

“Even at our scale, we are not cheap producers of milk and for the last 10 years, more and more dairy farmers here have left milking than any other country so that is an indication of how low profits are as the supermarkets have controlled the output price.

“On this farm, we are producing milk for the fresh milk trade, which has led the market down over the last number of years. Currently our feed costs per litre is 12.5p/litre.”

Replacement rearing

There are about 200 acres of the farm where it is more difficult to cut silage, so replacement heifers get to most of this when they are over 10 months old.

All calves are reared on the farm in specialised calf sheds, which local veterinary surgeon William McCarthy believes is a very good set-up.

“There are 475 calves reared in these two sheds facing each other and if we have lost more than 10 calves per year it would be a lot and the treatment rate is very low,” he said.

“The level of sickness in calves in this herd has plummeted since this new rearing protocol has been introduced and the foundation stone is getting enough colustrum into calves in the first 12 hours of life.”

Calves are fed five to six litres of powdered milk in buckets, in the individual pens, where they stay until they are six to seven weeks old.

From week one, they have access to meal and, at weaning, they will eat up to 1.5kg of coarse meal per calf per day as milk is reduced.

They are weaned from milk replacer at around 10 weeks of age. Calves stay on straw beds in this unit until they are seven months old.

After this, depending on the time of the year, they move to grass or cubicles in the slatted sheds where they are bred to AI.

The calf shed

Essentially, calves are housed in a large, high shed, with one open side.

The newborn calves are placed in plastic pens, which are easily dismantled when the calves are older but, importantly, the calves stay in the same pens in the shed until they are weaned.

The plastic individual pen dividers are made from recycled plastic. There is no moving of calves from one pen to another.

There is a good slope (40 to 1) from the back of the shed to the front.

One farm staff member is responsible for calf rearing and this minimises mistakes and ensures each calf gets the same treatment.