I recently had the pleasure of speaking at a few CAFRE Business Development Group (BDG) meetings.

At those events, I was pleasantly surprised at the calibre of farmers who are now attending, and it looks like the removal of the attendance money has left a core group who value the information being given.

At the meetings, there have been some really good groups of farmers with a real desire for knowledge, and a desire to implement that knowledge on their farms. Their willingness to openly share their financial benchmarking figures was really encouraging.

At times, I have been disappointed in my own BDG group as they seem very reluctant to be open to change but, after seeing other groups, I am hopeful that given time, they will feel confident enough to take on board new ideas.

Title

The title for my talk is “Making sucklers pay”, and despite all the negativity around the sector, I am completely confident that a properly managed suckler farm can provide a good return.

At one of the BDG meetings, the farmers openly discussed one of their own member’s benchmarking figures.

For about half an hour, they had some heated and hard-hitting debate.

The main line of thought was that suckler farming was finished. They listed more than half a dozen large local suckler farmers who were changing to dairying. I was quite shocked as I know some of these farmers, and I would have considered them to be at the top of their game.

When I got up to speak, I put up my first slide and I looked around and said, “I think I should just go home as I think that you have just finished with suckler cows.”

I didn’t go home, but continued with my presentation and after two hours I think that I had given them some more food for thought.

There was one aged man who came to me afterwards and shook my hand, and thanked me for telling a positive story about suckers.

It caused me to think a lot about what is going on in the suckler industry, and on the way home I went through all the suckler farmers that I knew who are converting to dairying.

By the time I reached the house I was quite deflated, as it is shocking the numbers that are exiting the sector. If it continues at this pace, the suckler cow will be gone within the next 10 years. So why is this happening? Is the suckler cow really so far behind the dairy cow?

Maybe it’s a matter of going with the flow. Are some farmers being swept along with some glamorous thoughts that they are going to make a fortune milking cows?

Investigated

I have investigated my own situation to see how a switch to dairy production would work. My farm would suit milking cows because we have so much land in the one block, and have a good lane and water infrastructure. My big problem is my housing is not suitable for dairy cows.

I would have to spend £400,000 on housing and a parlour. Then I would have to buy dairy cows. My suckler cows would go part way to covering this cost, but I would be upwards of £100,000 short. So, converting for me would cost upwards of half a million pounds.

Best case (interest rates staying unchanged) this would be £65,000/year payback for 10 years.

So, I would have to make an extra £1,000/ha/year just to be as good as I am now. I would also argue that you would need a lot more to justify the different lifestyle.

Advice

I really do wonder how much thought some farmers have given to jumping on the dairy bandwagon.

My advice is to think long and hard, and firstly see if there are changes that you can make to your suckler enterprise, before taking that big step and switching to dairying.

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