The rain has returned with a bang this week and it didn’t take much to turn ground conditions around very quickly. Gaps are starting to muck up a bit and cows aren’t as happy grazing out covers, but it’s the time of year for it at this stage so we can’t complain too much.

We will go once-a-day milking later in the week and start to feed a buffer of silage and some beet pulp nuts for the rest of the lactation. We have no cows dried off yet, but we will probably see a good few drop themselves out of the system from next week on.

The main health issue over the last few weeks has been bloat in both cows and young stock. We lost two of each over the space of a month and had to treat a handful more in both groups. The calves are grazing reseeds with a bit of clover through it so that is obviously a factor there but the cows are grazing high enough covers of grass with 4kg of meal in the parlour so it’s a bit unusual to see it in those circumstances.

High nitrates in the grass are probably a big factor with the cows and not something we usually see at this time of year. We have cooking oil in the calves’ water trough now to try to help and the cows will be fine once silage goes into the diet. Our vet is seeing a lot of cases in this part of the country over the last month. It’s just another little hit to take at the end of a rough year.

Truly Grass Fed

There has been a lot of commentary over the last few weeks about Glanbia’s latest venture of launching Truly Grass Fed cheese into the US market and potentially competing with the Kerrygold brand in the premium segment of the US grocery market.

Firstly, the Kerrygold brand is carved in stone as a household name in the German and US premium markets and has developed into something akin to Jameson Whiskey or Baileys Cream Liqueur.

The Truly Grass Fed brand is the equivalent of a small independent distillery setting up and telling a unique story to develop its own niche or segment in the market.

As a Glanbia supplier, and someone who has had to jump through more and more sustainability and quality assurance hoops every year since coming home to farm, I think it’s great from our point of view that Glanbia has finally started trying to capture more of the premiums available through branding our products and telling our unique story to the consumer.

Investment

As farmers, we have invested heavily in developing our farms to produce high-quality milk. We’ve invested again off the farm in top-quality facilities to process that milk. Then we sell most of those products at commodity prices and watch other companies harvest the real value from them further up the food chain. Those companies even use our story and credentials to further their margins in this regard.

It’s the equivalent of investing heavily in manufacturing hybrid engines for Toyota, testing them and proving that they are the most efficient and environmentally friendly engines in the market and then selling them cheaply to Toyota for them to put badges on and charge an arm and a leg for the car.

It’s about time we started putting more of our own badges on the front of more cars and getting the full value for our products. There will still be room for the Mercedes or Kerrygolds of this world to hold on to their market segment.