The Irish Farmers Journal travelled to the Leonard farm in Co Meath this week to see how they plan to operate during the busy spring period. Joe Leonard spoke about how he and his brother Matthew have grown the herd from calving 300 cows to 500 cows this year.

In terms of labour, other than one full-time employee and part-time help from their father, there is no other help on the farm. They also rear all their own replacements, so there is a high livestock to labour ratio, with about 200 livestock units per labour unit.

According to Joe, the key to the system is keeping everything simple. He said: “We have evolved the system to suit our needs – if we can think of an easy way of doing something, we will do it. I suppose a big help has been the use of once-a-day milking in the spring, mainly for quota reasons but it also has a huge effect on reducing the workload.”

A few days prior to calving, cows are moved to an open yard with a large, open, straw-bedded shed. This shed is capable of holding about 80 cows.

“At peak of calving, we will have 20 or 30 cows calving per day, so we need capacity,” Joe said.

Cows are picked out from the cubicles and put into this shed every day, meaning they only have to watch the cows in the straw shed and not worry about cows in the cubicles.

Calving pen

Cows calve on the straw area but if a cow needs to be handled or is having difficulty, there is a pen in the corner of the shed with a calving gate.

Calves are snatched from the cow, tagged and fed with colostrum soon after calving and put into a separate pen in the shed. They are moved to the calf shed in the morning or during the day.

The night calving shift starts at 2am. Whoever was on during the night finishes up at lunchtime the following day.

“This means there are three of us around in the morning when the bulk of the work is to be done,” Joe said.

Joe demonstrated a novel way of heating colostrum. Rather than using seven or eight litres of hot water to warm up colostrum, he adapted an old hot water cylinder to do the job. A steel basin is secured on top of the hot water tank which is connected to the coil going through the cylinder.

A tap is placed on the bottom of the cylinder which regulates the speed of the colostrum through the tank, so this also regulates how hot the milk is.

The water in the tank is heated on night-rate electricity, which is cheaper.

As cows are only milked once a day in the spring, no warm milk is available for feeding calves in the evening.

Rather than going down the road of heating milk for feeding to calves, which would require extra equipment and cost, not to mention extra time, the Leonards feed calves once a day from an early age.

“We start calves off on once-a-day feeding with 4.5 litres of milk per day and then build this up to six or seven litres over time,” Joe explained.

Initially, calves are grouped in batches of 10 but are then moved to groups of 45, which have access to fields and an open, straw-bedded shed. These calves are fed with a mobile calf feeder. Meal, water and hay is always available.

The Leonards milk the herd through a basic 40-unit herringbone. Milk for calves is diverted to a separate bulk tank via a dump line.

This bulk tank is sitting on weigh cells and there are digital readers in the milking parlour and on the bulk tank.

Depending on the number of calves to be fed, the milker can let in the precise amount of milk into the tank, avoiding any wastage.

There is a small submersible pump in the milk tank and this is used to pump milk to the calf shed and to fill the mobile calf feeder.

Again, the precise amount of milk can be pumped by using the digital scales. Being able to pump the milk speeds up calf feeding and avoids having to carry buckets or trolleys of milk around the yard.