Farm Profit Programme: Driving gross margin per ewe

Driving gross margin is key for our businesses to maximise profits. Each one has a relatively sensible fixed cost structure and so the only way for it to increase profit is to dilute the fixed costs over more heads. This week, we look at the Duguids and the Biffens, who are working on increasing their gross margin per ewe.

Duguid family

The last 12 months have seen a lot of activity at Cranna. Our rotational grazing trial with the sheep was a great success, with an output per hectare of over £2,000.

We have also got lambs out of the system earlier this year, meaning we were able to use the swedes for ewes and allowed the grass fields a much-needed rest. This will help ensure we have grass once lambing starts at the beginning of April.

With the cattle, we have really tightened up the bulling periods this year. While the number of cows falling outside the desired calving period was small, it will make routine tasks much easier, with less of a spread of ages on the farm.

Both spring and autumn herds have a strict 12-week breeding period. We also moved spring calving two week later, to better match the grass growth. This will mean that the cows will hit the grass with their young calves at foot, just as they are needing a lift in feed quality to drive milk production.

Despite losing two weeks of growth with calving a little later, the improved milk production will more than compensate for this and mean similar weaning weights for less wintering cost.

The gross margin of the spring herd is up £77/hd and the autumn herd is up £111/hd. This is a decent jump in one year, if we can maintain that progress for the next few years we’re onto a winner.

The ewes have taken a big jump from £65/hd to £97/hd. This is a massive jump, however, our benchmark year in 2016 was a particularly poor year for us. In 2016 we weaned just over 120% lambs/ewe, compared with nearly 160% this year. It just shows you where you need to be.

More of the same really. We’re going to increase the number of paddocks per grazing group. We want to increase daily live-weight gain in the calves up to weaning. Improving grass quality will go a long way to achieving this.

Wintering is a significant part of our cost base and we have been looking at ways to reduce this. This year, we took a batch of 20 well-conditioned dry cows at housing time and put them onto a straw and protein syrup diet for most of winter. In doing this, we used less straw between feeding and bedding than we did with the cows on straw and silage. Overall, there is a cost saving of around £50/cow for the winter in doing this. Six weeks pre-calving the cows moved on from this to a straw and silage diet to maximise colostrum quality.

We plan to wean more of the spring calves earlier this year to allow us to put more cows on this particular diet during the winter.

We are just about to start lambing and this year we will be running nearly 100 more ewes than in 2017. Again, we plan to get as many lambs finished off grass as possible.

The Biffen Family

The first year of the programme has flown by and it has seen plenty of changes here at Arnage. The major changes on the farm will see us move to more winter crop, to free up time in spring for calving and lambing, a 100% spring-calving herd that will become more compact in the coming years, and a complete change of ewe type to suit the outdoor lambing system we are running.

We have had a long hard look at each cow in the herd and combining this with weaning weights of the calves it has formed the basis of a culling policy for the future. With the overall age of the herd a little on the high side, we have had a good cull this year and bought-in heifers to take their place. Cull prices at the moment justify being ruthless.

Tightening the calving period has started, the bulls were left in for 15 weeks last summer, this will be reduced by a week to 10 days this year and anything not in calf at that stage will be culled.

We have moved to mule ewes to suit outdoor lambing better than what we had previously. The purchased-in gimmers are about to start lambing in early April so time will tell as to how they perform.

Gross margin for the cows has increased by £75/hd to £524/hd. It’s good to see it going in the right direction even after just one year, although there is still some way to go to achieve the £750/hd target. As we get a more even batch of calves each year and more productive cows this will have a significant impact going forward.

Gross margin for the ewes is back by £21/hd to £44/hd. We expected this as we had a poor lambing last year, hence the change in direction in ewe type this year. Over the next couple of years, the entire flock will change over to mules and hopefully we can have a much higher output from the same level of input.

We want to make as much top-quality silage as possible this year. We did this last year and it has worked very well, although we could have done with more – but this is the case on most farms this year with the extended winter. Our improved silage quality increased feed value by 0.25kg/day on growing stock, which allowed us to reduce the barley input and maintain growth rates.

We will also rotationally graze the sheep this year across seven paddocks of new grass. We want to get more fat lambs away earlier in the season and avoid having a large carryover into the new year.

Grassland management for the cows and calves has room for improvement also, we need to invest in a lot in fencing and grazing infrastructure, as well as reseeding over the next couple of years to get the farm growing more grass.

Conclusion

Both families are working hard to improve the bottom line. While the Duguids have made large inroads to the ewes in year one, we expect to see similar improvements for the Biffens this year, as the change of ewe type feeds through.