The Farm Profit Programme (FFP) Suckler Focus Group (bit of an unwieldy title) met here last week.

Basically it’s a group of 10 farmers who look at each other’s businesses to see how we can collectively improve.

On our last visit, the host farmers had Simmental-cross cows and we were quick to tell them they were too big. But unfortunately now it was my turn, and with some of my Stabiliser cows still on the large side, they were able to get their own back.

We cull quite hard on feet, udders, temperament and age

We weigh our cows at weaning, so we got the group to guess the weight of the largest and smallest cows.

They are carrying some extra condition after the plentiful grass this summer.

A few of the group were close to the smallest cow weighing 605kg, but nobody guessed that the largest cow was as big as 935kg.

We cull quite hard on feet, udders, temperament and age so haven’t had a chance to look at cow weights yet. Going forward, we clearly need to look more at this, along with individual cow performance.

Grazed

The first group of cows that we looked at were being strip-grazed on deferred grass, which was a three-year-old sward.

I wasn’t expecting this grass to grow much this year given that the Italian ryegrass, being a biennial, had mostly died out.

However, the sward had some Tetraploid in it, so although it was on the thin side, there was still too much leaf there for us to sacrifice by ploughing in the spring.

One of the farmers said it was a complete disaster and we should have taken a second cut as we had just wasted the grass

We had taken one cut of silage on the 10 June, and let it grow after that.

One of the farmers said it was a complete disaster and we should have taken a second cut as we had just wasted the grass.

However, the FFP advisers said that the quality of the standing grass would be the same as silage cut towards the end of July, so that made me feel a lot better. I can’t print what the farmer’s reply was, but suffice to say it had something to do with cow pats.

Swift

We then looked at cows being strip-grazed on Swift, which the group was happier to endorse. This had been sown at the end of August into spring barley stubble.

Ideally it would have been drilled two weeks earlier, but this year’s harvest was a bit later.

The FFP advisers reckoned there was almost a tonne to the acre of dry matter.

Our farm is spread over several holdings within six miles of our main base at Womblehill

When we worked out the cost of seed, fertiliser, contract direct-drilling, etc, it was still cost-effective, even if straw is a fraction of last year’s price.

We also don’t have bedding and mucking out to do, so it should be fine on our free-draining land as long as it doesn’t become too wet.

Our farm is spread over several holdings within six miles of our main base at Womblehill. I wanted the group to consider how we could save labour, tyres, fuel and depreciation, as we spend too much time running around the countryside.

Ideas

They came up with several good ideas, some of which we will put into place. We need to make changes so that our suckler herd has a positive effect on our business in the future.

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