Galicia is a region in the northwest of Spain – the part above Portugal and closest to Ireland. The people here call themselves Celts, just like the Irish, the Welsh and people from Brittany in France. Listening to the traditional music in Galicia, you could just as easily be in Connemara as Compostela.
Most people who travel to the city of Santiago de Compostela do so on foot – it being the terminus of one of the most popular Camino walks. But it was farming, not religious walks, that brought me to Galicia.
The region gets more rain than Cork and as much sunshine as Milan in Italy. The soils are deep and fertile, making it an ideal place to farm. Better again, Spain has a population of 46m people and is a net importer of milk. What more do you want to farm – rain, sun, good soils and a large market on your doorstep?
But Galicia is a difficult place to farm. For one thing, the structure is not conducive to modern-day farming. Galicia itself has a population of approximately two million people, but 1.5m of them own land, so land fragmentation is a huge problem. It’s not uncommon for a 100ha farm to have 100 different owners. Most of these owners are not farmers – but they collect the rent.
Like their celtic cousins in Ireland, land ownership is ingrained in who the Galicians are. Land passes down through the generations and they don’t want to be the ones to sell it. Land ownership was granted to the Galicians back in history after a socialist uprising so owning land is important from a familial and nationalistic perspective.
But back to farming. The other structural issue is forestry. Over 65% of the land area in Galicia is forestry and just 20% is used for farming.
Many of the landowners have decided to plant their land in forestry to provide firewood for the winter and a source of income from timber sales.
Milk processing
Another negative is the structure of milk processing. There are seven milk processors in the region including large multinationals such as Danone, Nestlé and Lactalis. The farmer suppliers don’t have ownership of the processing and the milk companies don’t fight for the milk, so milk prices tend to be a few cent per litre lower than the European average.
This shows the contrast in Spain; on the one hand there are great natural resources and on the other there are great constraints brought about by the structure of the industry. So farmers must be resilient in order to survive and thrive.
Alonso Jose Iglesias is one such farmer. His parents bought the farm in 1986 and they started off milking 30 cows. Alonso joined the business in 2000 and they set up a limited company and cow numbers increased to 60. By 2011, the Iglesias family was milking 90 cows and when I visited in June they were milking 135 cows.
The eight-unit double-up GEA parlour (above) was built in 2015.
A new cubicle shed and calf shed was built in 2017 to cater for the extra cows. A new eight-unit double-up milking parlour was built in 2015. The facilities are good, but they’d want to be as the cows are in the sheds all year round.
Cows
The 145 cows on the farm are some of the highest-yielding in the world. In 2017, the herd produced 12,959kg of milk per cow. Alonso says that for 2018 the cows are on track to produce over 13,500kg of milk – phenomenal output.
Genetics are all extreme Holstein Friesian, mostly from ABS sires. Cows are very tall, very angular but also in very good body condition score – a testament to Alonso’s excellent management. The cows are only milked twice a day. This makes the production even more spectacular as most herds yielding over 11,000kg are milked three times daily. Average production per day at the end of June was 43l/day.
The Iglesias herd is fully confined and very high-yielding.
Production is pretty solid throughout the year as cows calve all year round. When I visited, there were 135 cows milking and 10 dry cows. The cubicle shed is a free stall barn. The milkers are kept in two groups – the main group and then the freshly calved group.
The dairy is alongside the parlour. Newborn calves are kept in individual pens for the first 70 to 80 days of life. They are fed four litres of their dam’s colostrum as soon as possible after calving. After that, they get eight feeds of their mother’s milk. Following that, they go on 1kg of milk powder per day split into two feeds of 0.5kg of powder in 3l of water. Bull calves are sold at 15 days of age.
When the calves eat 3kg of meal per day, they are weaned off milk. After weaning, the calves go into groups of four and stay in hutches. They stay in these groups of four until they calve. Alonso says it is better that heifers of the same age stay together as they know each other better when they calve and there is less stress when they join the herd.
As they get older, the youngstock move from straw-bedded hutches to sand-bedded sheds to adult cow cubicles. They are on the same diet as the milkers until they are eight months old, and then they go on the dry cow diet. Heifers are bred at 13 months old or when they reach 400kg liveweight.
Cows are dried off 45 days before calving due date. They are moved to a straw-bedded area 15 days before calving. I asked Alonso what criteria he uses when picking bulls to use across his herd. He says he looks at bulls with longevity, low SCC, good udder, good legs and good claw shape to help prevent lameness. Calving interval is 405 days and 25% of the herd is culled every year.
Feed
Obviously, the quantity and quality of the feed into the cows has a big bearing on the performance. Alonso is farming 65ha in total, but only 13ha are owned with the rest rented in the locality. The average rental price is €265/ha €107/ac). Of the 65ha being farmed, 35ha are in maize and 30ha are in grass. None of the animals graze so the grassland is just used for silage.
The maize is all grown for feed. After harvesting the maize in September, Alonso sows hybrid and Italian ryegrass on the maize stubbles with an air drill. He then cuts this grass for silage in early spring before ploughing the field for maize again.
Overall stocking rate is 2.63 cows/ha. The average maize yield is 13t DM/ha and the average grass yield is 7t DM/ha.
The different silage pits hold maize and grass silage.
The main milking cow diet consists of 27kg of maize silage, 16kg of grass silage, 0.5kg of straw, 7kg of wet brewers grains, 6kg of maize meal, 5.5kg of rapeseed meal, 0.75kg of dried sugar beet pulp and 0.75kg of a mineral mix containing minerals, fat, live yeast and a mycotoxin protector. This breaks down to a 68% forage diet with the remainder being concentrates and minerals. No meal is fed in the parlour, with all concentrates fed in the TMR.
When I visited with the European Dairy Farmers in late June, the cows were milking 43 litres per day at 3.60% fat and 3.30% protein or a little over 3kg of milk solids per cow.
This is almost double the production of a typical Irish cow in mid-season. But again there is a cost to this as 20kg of concentrates is being fed per day when you include brewers grains. Feed costs in 2017 were 9c/l.
Cows close to calving are fed wholecrop oats. This is purchased into the farm in big square bales at a cost of €150/t. The crop of oats is cut at the 75% ripe stage so the grain is still soft. The crop is cut and air dried before being milled into a finer chop length and repackaged in bales. Because the crop is milled, the bales weigh a lot more than conventional big square bales and are tied with wire.
Straw for feeding is also purchased in this way. When buying the straw, Alonso can specify the chop length that he wants. The straw costs about €100/t delivered. Of this, about €75 is for the straw and the rest is for the transport. All the straw and oats come from central Spain where tillage crops are sown, which is about 400km away from Galicia.
The dry cows and heifers get chopped straw and rapeseed, which is mixed every second day. The milkers are fed every day. When he was constructing the new cubicle shed, Alonso installed a stainless steel sheet to go under where the silage is fed out. He hopes that this will prevent feed wastage and that it will also help to reduce the wear and erosion on the concrete from the silage effluent. The strip cost €90/m length and it’s moulded into the floor and bolted on to the wall.
Such high production does come at a cost, and not just in terms of feed costs. Labour input is high. The cows and farm looks fantastic and attention to detail is very high. Alonso is the owner operator and he is joined by three other full-time employees. Each member of staff gets one and a half days off per week. The minimum number of staff it takes to run the farm is three.
The labour input is high, even with twice-daily milking. Average hours worked per cow per year is 80. This is very high and well over twice the Irish average according to a Teagasc labour study. Some herds in Ireland are doing less than 16 hours per cow per year while herds in other countries such as New Zealand and Australia can get it down to less than 10.
High-output farms like Alonso’s take a lot of work. Cows are milked at 7am and again at 6.30pm. The sand in the cubicle beds is changed once a week and scraped down twice a day. All animals are fed once daily and the feed pushed in a number of times per day. Labour costs are €10/hour.
There are calves to be fed milk every day and, on average, a cow will calve every second day. Standards are high and any slippage will result in less milk output and, as a result, less profit made on the farm.
But it’s not as though viable alternative systems exist for farmers like Alonso. It’s not as if he can graze cows because the farm is too fragmented. Some farmers do graze, but they tend to be smaller herds and organic milk producers.
According to the European Dairy Farmers organisation, of which Alonso is a member, the farm made a profit in 2017 of 2.2c/l. This profit figure includes full costings for labour and gives a return to all assets employed in the business. So an interest rate is charged on all owned land and buildings, whether there is debt attached to them or not.
Total income is 34.5c/l. Direct running costs are 13.66c/l, while labour and building costs are 15.3c/l and other costs are 3.2c/l.
This leaves a margin of 2.2c/l before direct subsidies of 2.5c/l are included. The margins are small, even with such high milk yield per cow and after a high milk price.
However, while the margins are small, the litres are high. In round figure terms, Alonso has a profit of €85,270 from farming in 2017. From this, he needs to pay for his own living expenses, tax and make debt repayments.
Galicia is a region in the northwest of Spain – the part above Portugal and closest to Ireland. The people here call themselves Celts, just like the Irish, the Welsh and people from Brittany in France. Listening to the traditional music in Galicia, you could just as easily be in Connemara as Compostela.
Most people who travel to the city of Santiago de Compostela do so on foot – it being the terminus of one of the most popular Camino walks. But it was farming, not religious walks, that brought me to Galicia.
The region gets more rain than Cork and as much sunshine as Milan in Italy. The soils are deep and fertile, making it an ideal place to farm. Better again, Spain has a population of 46m people and is a net importer of milk. What more do you want to farm – rain, sun, good soils and a large market on your doorstep?
But Galicia is a difficult place to farm. For one thing, the structure is not conducive to modern-day farming. Galicia itself has a population of approximately two million people, but 1.5m of them own land, so land fragmentation is a huge problem. It’s not uncommon for a 100ha farm to have 100 different owners. Most of these owners are not farmers – but they collect the rent.
Like their celtic cousins in Ireland, land ownership is ingrained in who the Galicians are. Land passes down through the generations and they don’t want to be the ones to sell it. Land ownership was granted to the Galicians back in history after a socialist uprising so owning land is important from a familial and nationalistic perspective.
But back to farming. The other structural issue is forestry. Over 65% of the land area in Galicia is forestry and just 20% is used for farming.
Many of the landowners have decided to plant their land in forestry to provide firewood for the winter and a source of income from timber sales.
Milk processing
Another negative is the structure of milk processing. There are seven milk processors in the region including large multinationals such as Danone, Nestlé and Lactalis. The farmer suppliers don’t have ownership of the processing and the milk companies don’t fight for the milk, so milk prices tend to be a few cent per litre lower than the European average.
This shows the contrast in Spain; on the one hand there are great natural resources and on the other there are great constraints brought about by the structure of the industry. So farmers must be resilient in order to survive and thrive.
Alonso Jose Iglesias is one such farmer. His parents bought the farm in 1986 and they started off milking 30 cows. Alonso joined the business in 2000 and they set up a limited company and cow numbers increased to 60. By 2011, the Iglesias family was milking 90 cows and when I visited in June they were milking 135 cows.
The eight-unit double-up GEA parlour (above) was built in 2015.
A new cubicle shed and calf shed was built in 2017 to cater for the extra cows. A new eight-unit double-up milking parlour was built in 2015. The facilities are good, but they’d want to be as the cows are in the sheds all year round.
Cows
The 145 cows on the farm are some of the highest-yielding in the world. In 2017, the herd produced 12,959kg of milk per cow. Alonso says that for 2018 the cows are on track to produce over 13,500kg of milk – phenomenal output.
Genetics are all extreme Holstein Friesian, mostly from ABS sires. Cows are very tall, very angular but also in very good body condition score – a testament to Alonso’s excellent management. The cows are only milked twice a day. This makes the production even more spectacular as most herds yielding over 11,000kg are milked three times daily. Average production per day at the end of June was 43l/day.
The Iglesias herd is fully confined and very high-yielding.
Production is pretty solid throughout the year as cows calve all year round. When I visited, there were 135 cows milking and 10 dry cows. The cubicle shed is a free stall barn. The milkers are kept in two groups – the main group and then the freshly calved group.
The dairy is alongside the parlour. Newborn calves are kept in individual pens for the first 70 to 80 days of life. They are fed four litres of their dam’s colostrum as soon as possible after calving. After that, they get eight feeds of their mother’s milk. Following that, they go on 1kg of milk powder per day split into two feeds of 0.5kg of powder in 3l of water. Bull calves are sold at 15 days of age.
When the calves eat 3kg of meal per day, they are weaned off milk. After weaning, the calves go into groups of four and stay in hutches. They stay in these groups of four until they calve. Alonso says it is better that heifers of the same age stay together as they know each other better when they calve and there is less stress when they join the herd.
As they get older, the youngstock move from straw-bedded hutches to sand-bedded sheds to adult cow cubicles. They are on the same diet as the milkers until they are eight months old, and then they go on the dry cow diet. Heifers are bred at 13 months old or when they reach 400kg liveweight.
Cows are dried off 45 days before calving due date. They are moved to a straw-bedded area 15 days before calving. I asked Alonso what criteria he uses when picking bulls to use across his herd. He says he looks at bulls with longevity, low SCC, good udder, good legs and good claw shape to help prevent lameness. Calving interval is 405 days and 25% of the herd is culled every year.
Feed
Obviously, the quantity and quality of the feed into the cows has a big bearing on the performance. Alonso is farming 65ha in total, but only 13ha are owned with the rest rented in the locality. The average rental price is €265/ha €107/ac). Of the 65ha being farmed, 35ha are in maize and 30ha are in grass. None of the animals graze so the grassland is just used for silage.
The maize is all grown for feed. After harvesting the maize in September, Alonso sows hybrid and Italian ryegrass on the maize stubbles with an air drill. He then cuts this grass for silage in early spring before ploughing the field for maize again.
Overall stocking rate is 2.63 cows/ha. The average maize yield is 13t DM/ha and the average grass yield is 7t DM/ha.
The different silage pits hold maize and grass silage.
The main milking cow diet consists of 27kg of maize silage, 16kg of grass silage, 0.5kg of straw, 7kg of wet brewers grains, 6kg of maize meal, 5.5kg of rapeseed meal, 0.75kg of dried sugar beet pulp and 0.75kg of a mineral mix containing minerals, fat, live yeast and a mycotoxin protector. This breaks down to a 68% forage diet with the remainder being concentrates and minerals. No meal is fed in the parlour, with all concentrates fed in the TMR.
When I visited with the European Dairy Farmers in late June, the cows were milking 43 litres per day at 3.60% fat and 3.30% protein or a little over 3kg of milk solids per cow.
This is almost double the production of a typical Irish cow in mid-season. But again there is a cost to this as 20kg of concentrates is being fed per day when you include brewers grains. Feed costs in 2017 were 9c/l.
Cows close to calving are fed wholecrop oats. This is purchased into the farm in big square bales at a cost of €150/t. The crop of oats is cut at the 75% ripe stage so the grain is still soft. The crop is cut and air dried before being milled into a finer chop length and repackaged in bales. Because the crop is milled, the bales weigh a lot more than conventional big square bales and are tied with wire.
Straw for feeding is also purchased in this way. When buying the straw, Alonso can specify the chop length that he wants. The straw costs about €100/t delivered. Of this, about €75 is for the straw and the rest is for the transport. All the straw and oats come from central Spain where tillage crops are sown, which is about 400km away from Galicia.
The dry cows and heifers get chopped straw and rapeseed, which is mixed every second day. The milkers are fed every day. When he was constructing the new cubicle shed, Alonso installed a stainless steel sheet to go under where the silage is fed out. He hopes that this will prevent feed wastage and that it will also help to reduce the wear and erosion on the concrete from the silage effluent. The strip cost €90/m length and it’s moulded into the floor and bolted on to the wall.
Such high production does come at a cost, and not just in terms of feed costs. Labour input is high. The cows and farm looks fantastic and attention to detail is very high. Alonso is the owner operator and he is joined by three other full-time employees. Each member of staff gets one and a half days off per week. The minimum number of staff it takes to run the farm is three.
The labour input is high, even with twice-daily milking. Average hours worked per cow per year is 80. This is very high and well over twice the Irish average according to a Teagasc labour study. Some herds in Ireland are doing less than 16 hours per cow per year while herds in other countries such as New Zealand and Australia can get it down to less than 10.
High-output farms like Alonso’s take a lot of work. Cows are milked at 7am and again at 6.30pm. The sand in the cubicle beds is changed once a week and scraped down twice a day. All animals are fed once daily and the feed pushed in a number of times per day. Labour costs are €10/hour.
There are calves to be fed milk every day and, on average, a cow will calve every second day. Standards are high and any slippage will result in less milk output and, as a result, less profit made on the farm.
But it’s not as though viable alternative systems exist for farmers like Alonso. It’s not as if he can graze cows because the farm is too fragmented. Some farmers do graze, but they tend to be smaller herds and organic milk producers.
According to the European Dairy Farmers organisation, of which Alonso is a member, the farm made a profit in 2017 of 2.2c/l. This profit figure includes full costings for labour and gives a return to all assets employed in the business. So an interest rate is charged on all owned land and buildings, whether there is debt attached to them or not.
Total income is 34.5c/l. Direct running costs are 13.66c/l, while labour and building costs are 15.3c/l and other costs are 3.2c/l.
This leaves a margin of 2.2c/l before direct subsidies of 2.5c/l are included. The margins are small, even with such high milk yield per cow and after a high milk price.
However, while the margins are small, the litres are high. In round figure terms, Alonso has a profit of €85,270 from farming in 2017. From this, he needs to pay for his own living expenses, tax and make debt repayments.
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