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January seems to be the time for farmers’ meetings. Several have taken place recently, but the most interesting for me was the one on milk from forage.
The room was completely packed, so perhaps at long last farmers over here are getting the message of the potential of milk from grass.
He farms to make money so he can spend time with his family and go on holiday
The main speaker of the evening was my contemporary hero Keith Davis, who runs a very high-yielding autumn-calving farm at home with two robots. In addition to this, he also manages Lydney Park Estate, which has with 1,000 cows, is spring-calving, and employs once-a-day milking, yielding 3,500l.
Keith maintains that he farms to make money so he can spend time with his family and go on holiday.
He says there is nothing like a dairy farmer to make life complicated, but he intends to keep life as simple as possible.
When the herd at home was wiped out with foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, he bought cows over the phone without seeing them based on high PLIs.
He maintains that this was completely successful in establishing one of the highest-index herds in the country.
He puts more cows through the robot than the manufacturer intends. He says this puts a ceiling on production which he maintains is better for the cows. He has a tight calving pattern, with 20% empty, but has a neighbour with a flying herd who is happy to take his in-calf cows that are out of sequence.
Five cuts of silage
His main focus at the meeting was to promote five cuts of silage a year. This was obviously forage for the high-yielding home farm.
He is adamant that increased silage costs are more than outweighed by increased milk production.
He had a lightbulb moment when returning from a grazing meeting, realising that paddock grazing on a 21-day cycle maintained the best grass growth and quality.
Therefore, why not do it with silage making? Although he enjoys increased milk production and financial rewards from all that silage harvesting, he wryly comments that he has a job to fit in his holidays.
He said he opened the gate, the cows galloped around, saying "lovely carpet but where is the food?"
The farm he manages with 1,000 cows on once-a-day milking was originally 350 cows yielding 13,000 litres on three-times-a-day milking.
After a few years, he completely changed the management, changing the breed of cattle to Jersey crosses and reducing cake consumption. He found the harder he cut the cake, the more profitable he became.
He did comment, as other people have, that you have to teach cows how to graze.
He said he opened the gate, the cows galloped around, saying "lovely carpet but where is the food?"
He used to use up to 15 bulls but now does all AI. He found that every time they changed paddocks, the bulls fought to the death or tried to kill him.
He did say both systems were profitable but you had to bear in mind that autumn calving and robots enables you to thrive in the good times, but spring-calving milk from forage enables you to survive in the bad times.
Shreddage
The other speaker for the evening was promoting shreddage. This was maize produced by two rollers rotating at different speeds resulting in a tearing rather than cutting effect that produced longer fibre and kernels which did not pass through the cow so readily, and in three out of four experiments, increased production.
On the home front, the power failures at Christmas obviously upset the parlour computer.
We thought the cake in the bulk-hopper was going down too slowly, and check-weighed the individual cow rations that were being delivered into the manger.
We were only feeding on average two-thirds of the cake we were supposed to. Some augers were only delivering one-third of the required ration.
When the engineer came and reset the computer, we were surprised when he said he had never known anyone check-weigh their feeders before.
We have since installed an expensive battery pack to safeguard the computer against power spikes.
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