Results Day: Scanning 2015

Just a quick blog post today to update you all on what's been happening on farm.

At this time of year we look to build farm cover by extending the grazing round. We build up a bank of grass to keep us grazing until drying off at the end of November. Unfortunately, temperatures have been below average, as has rainfall. This has meant feeding silage a month earlier than planned. But in the last fortnight we finally had significant rain, and covers are now back on target.

Getting ready to scan some heifers!

The other news this month are our scanning results. This year, cows were mated for 12 weeks, 6 weeks of AI and 6 weeks of stock bulls. Heifers all had a single fixed timed AI then ran with Jersey bulls for 12 weeks.

As our favourite vet, "Kiwi" Kate Burnby, was only in the area for a few days, we decided to bite the bullet and scan all 370 cows and 140 heifers in one day. We started in the morning scanning on the vet platform as the cows are milked on the rotary parlour. Kate is so fast at this that the whole process barely added half an hour to our milking time!

The great news was that for the third season in a row only 7% of our cows were empty. With 83% in calf to the 6 week AI.

After some toast and a mug of tea, we set off to the runoff block to scan the R2s. We've never scanned R2s before, but given our surplus of stock we thought it would at least give us the option to sell some. Despite my reservations that these were a smaller group of heifers than the year before, we only found 5% empty (7 heifers), with 84% in the first 6 weeks. We won't know how well they have held to the AI, but Kate seemed confident that a lot of them would be early calving.

We're obviously really pleased with all the results and are now faced with many options for next season. Here are just a few:

1. Keep everything and milk more cows

2. Sell surplus heifers

3. Sell surplus cows

4. Clean out herd with more voluntary culling

Whilst I'm considering all of these, I'd rather not winter any stock I don't intend to keep and milk myself next season. But at the end of the day it's great to have a choice.

Before I sign off  just a quick thanks  to Clawdd Offa for letting us borrow Sue for the day! She was a massive help and it's fair to say we couldn't have managed without her. And of course thanks to Kate for a professional and efficient scanning.

Until next time,

Keep grazing!

Cutting Costs

So here it is. A simple graph illustrating milk price volatility in the last ten years. Dairy farmers worldwide will be acutely aware of where we are today. Everyone has a slightly different story of how we've ended up in this mess, from the Russian ban on EU imports, to Chinese over purchasing. I'm not going to wade in on the causalities, only to say they are many, complex and often interlinked. Instead I've chosen to focus on what I can control: my own cost of production.

The biggest advantage of a seasonal calving, grass based system, is the low cost per KG of milk which can be achieved. With grazed grass the cheapest feed available, matching cow demand to grass growth helps to not only insulate us from the volatility of purchased feed costs, but also to avoid the "hidden" costs of wastage, substitution and depreciation. From these core values of grass utilisation and production costs, I sat down today and wrote out the key areas in which I could cut costs next season.

Are you carrying surplus animals?

• Carry fewer surplus animals. This is probably the single biggest place I can save money. Scan cows early and cull/sell anything you don't intend to milk next season. Wintering is a big costs for an animal that you won't milk the next season. We would usually keep some late calvers and sell to them into the UK, year round calving, market. Unfortunately I don't think there will be a big market for these animals in a low milk price year.

• Use Stock Bulls on our bulling heifers. Despite our success with AI over the past two seasons, it is still a cost which can be saved from our cash flows. Any herd expansion plans will be put on hold in light of the milk price, so the cost of fewer AI bred replacements can be mitigated. This leads on to my second point...

• Less intervention in the main herd. For the past three seasons we have used CIDRs on all +42 day calved cows, which haven't cycled premating. Despite averaging a respectable 56% conception, the numbers we have to treat have fallen as the herd quality has improved. With a surplus of R1s, it is now time to "mine" this core fertility and trust we will get enough replacements without the 5-7% CIDR cows.

• Delay repairs and cut capital expenditure. In any other year I'd love to upgrade some of our tracks and purchase a better handling facility for our youngstock. But these will have to wait. We have invested a lot in recent years, upgrading everything from the parlour to water system. Now it's time to put the chequebook away and focus on making the most out of what we have.

• Reduce regrassing. Typically we would look to reseed 10% of the milking platform a year. However this could be reduced to 5% or less for the coming season. Apart from the immediate savings in seed and contracting, it would also act as insurance against inclement weather which would otherwise force us to purchase more feed.

Hopefully these suggestions have given you all some food for thought about your own on farm costs. Exceptionally low milk prices will call for a degree of short termism, which may not sit comfortably with our long term goals. But when the battle is right in front of us, the real victory will be if we're still around to farm the year after!