On Wednesday and Thursday this week, the last bag nitrogen was spread to give the Greenfield farm a final push for grass.

The 40 units per acre applied bring the total bag nitrogen spread to 250kg per hectare for the year – the maximum allowed under the Nitrates Directive for the farm stocking rate.

Normally the farm would only have 20 units per acre to spread in mid-September, but the drought meant a round was skipped so that allowed a heavier application this time around. There is still meal in the diet and its retail price is €295/t.

Statement

The August milk statement arrived and a total of 141,370 litres was sold for the month in question and brings the total volume delivered year to date to over 1m litres.

The August milk cheque is worth €55,300 to the farm. As the farm is in a number of the Glanbia fixed milk price schemes, there are a number of milk prices on the statement.

In total, the statement suggests there were 12,591kg of milk solids delivered over the period so it works out at €4.39 per kilo milk solids.

Cents per litre

When we talk about cents per litre, the milk price ranged from 34.7c/l for the proportion of milk in the 2016 fixed scheme to 38.3c/l for the manufacturing milk price for August 2018.

A batch of not-in-calf cows has been sold so the farm stocking rate is now back to 293 cows milking on 121ha. This lower stocking rate should help the farm increase grass supply.

The last milk test (21 September) shows a result of about 1.6kg of milk solids per cow for the 293 milking cows (17kg per cow at 4.21% protein, 5.03% fat). Cell count is at 131 SCC, 4 TBC and 4.7% lactose.

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Greenfield Farm: mid-September and finally the feed tap can be turned back