One of the things that I really love about being a dairy farmer is that we can measure everything. You see I’m a numbers man, so when this week when it came to weighing heifers, measuring grass and going through the results of my 2014 profit monitor I was in my element.

Our heifers were weighed and split into two groups on December the first. One group was housed and fed silage plus 1kg of a grower nut. These were the heifers that were on or over target weight, the other group were the heifers who were under target weight. The latter were let out on good grass and fed 1.5 kgs of the same nut.

Targets

This week when we weighed them again, our indoor heifers had kept ahead of target with a daily gain of .64 kg. Armed with this information we decided to take them off meal as they will be turned out on 1 February. The heifers we kept outdoors outperformed our indoor stock with an average daily gain of .95 kg. They are still slightly behind target, but not as much as they were in the beginning of December.

It was decided to keep them on meal until the beginning of February, when we will mix the two groups and run them together. I have no doubt that all these heifers will be above or close to target weight as makes no difference when it comes to breeding them on the 20 April. This is only the case because we weighed and measured their performance on the 1 December and we took action where needed.

Grass

Looking across the farm, it’s obvious that grass has been growing and covers have built nicely over the winter months. We measure grass religiously on this farm and we took our opening cover this past week. While not surprised at the results, I was still delighted to see that the farm had grown an average of 10kgs of dry matter per hectare per day and the average cover is 11,00 kgs per hectare. This is a huge bonus and, if managed correctly, should provide us with the opportunity to get a lot of the milk we produce this spring out the gate at a reasonably low cost.

Profit monitors

This week I have been also digesting my profit monitor results. There are no real surprises here, only confirmation that there is very little I can cut out. To be honest this comes as a bit of a relief because if there was any big cuts to be made the question would have to be asked: what were they doing there in the first place?

My mantra is measure to manage, because I believe that if we can measure and control what is inside our farm gate it puts us in a much stronger position to deal with negative pressures that come from outside the farm gate.