Peak Milk: Flat rate feeding systems

Cows grazing paddock 26, sown with AberGain.

We've had a week of very warm weather. Growth was recorded at 60 on Monday, but with some much needed rain forecast, hopefully it will have overtaken demand, which is running closer to 70.

Cows are down to 1kg a day of meal in the parlour, just enough to maintain a steady cowflow in the dairy. Despite cutting out the meal, milk output hasn't dropped, with cows giving 2.1kgMS. One thing we've noticed, however, is that with the good weather and our fast rotation, there is very little stem in the base of the sward. This is the equivalent of feeding more of the "concentrate", leafy, part of the grass plant, with high energy and protein, but low structural fibre. Butterfats are very low, at 3.55%, but volumes are very high at 29.5 litres. 

So the question is should we be feeding more of a high fibre meal to redress this balance?

In short I'd say no. Especially with this years' milk prices. With this in mind I thought I'd discuss an alternative approach.

A lot of UK seasonal calvers have adopted a flat rate feeding approach. Cows are fed the same amount of meal , typically 3-4kg/cow, everyday of lactation, essentially fixing demand. Here are some pros and cons of this system:

Pros:

-Very easy to budget meal costs.

-Easy for staff, less decision making.

-Efficient way of administering minerals.

-Consistent part of diet for cows.

-Can protect milk income from vagaries of grass quality and weather.

Cons:

-Unable to capitalise on a "good growing year", where high grass growth leads to lower meal costs.

-Surplus growth can only be captured as silage.

-Without an appropriate stocking rate the points above can be exacerbated.

In our own position flat rate feeding doesn't add up. This is because we already make enough silage on our runoff block. Any silage made from the platform is a management headache, as we prefer to keep the whole grazing block in our rotation, challenging cows to eat as much cheap, high quality grass as possible.

Whatever approach you take to supplement feeding the important questions to ask are:

1) Why am I feeding?

2) From a whole systems approach, does it pay?

Until next time, keep grazing!

Emlyn

Magic Day at last!

Just a quick post to mark the passing of Magic Day, where grass growth overtakes demand. My guess was it was sometime last week.

It hasn't been a vintage Spring, with growth generally below average for much of March. But there's nothing like a good April to cheer us up!

April scenes at Tre Abbot

As you can make out in the picture, we've done our reseeding this week. 

I'll have to write a separate post on reseeding, but until then here's the brief:

This years mix/per acre is, AberGain 7Kg, AberChoice 7Kg and AberHerald clover 2Kg.

For more information on grass varieties check out the new Irish Pasture Profit Index: 

http://www.agresearch.teagasc.ie/moorepark/PastureProfitIndex/ppts/TeagascPastureProfitIndex2015.pdf

I hope you're all enjoying the weather, and until next time, keep grazing!

Emlyn

Pre Mating Part 1: Get your calendar out!

As we approach our spring PSM (planned start of mating) I thought I'd write a post about the pre-mating work we do, and why this is one of the most time critical parts of the year!

It seems a bit relentless, but as soon as calving comes to an end, we're already thinking of next season and getting them back in calf. The main tasks can be divided into the following:

1) Heifer mating - Whether you plan to AI or turn the bulls in, now is the perfect time to weigh your maiden heifers to see if they're going to meet target weights to bull. While we have them in the handling yard we like to make the most of the time, so we've been vaccinating, trimming tails, worming and giving them a mineral bolus. Their final weigh-in will be next week. This year anything below 10% of target will be ran with the bulls from Day 1, with the rest getting a fixed time AI. I'm hoping that at least 100/140 will be heavy enough.

2) Pre-mating heats - The past three seasons we have tail painted the heard 42 days before PSM and recorded pre-mating heats. These have helped us get a picture of cows activity which we can consult throughout mating, in case we've missed heats or to spot cystic cows which tend to have very short, frequent cycles.

3) Metricheck and treat - The whole herd has been metrichecked, with cows showing endometritis or "whites", marked and treat accordingly. This is now a weekly practise, with this "dirty" group checked once a week and any non cyclers rechecked during milking. This may seem like overkill, but the key is that I check and treat the cows myself instead of the cost and hassle of calling the vet out.

Metricheck devices are available in the UK, and are an invaluable tool for quick diagnosis in block calving herds.

Treatment then falls into three categories, in order of severity from OK to worst, they are:
1) Washout with a dilute iodine solution, we use pevidine scrub.
2) Metricure antibiotic, no milk withhold.
3) 4 days course of antibiotics, milk withheld, we use Pen & Strep.

April is always a busy month, but the sooner we can set our breeding animals up for mating, the greater our chances of success. Relatively cheap solutions now, can have a huge impact on your eventual performance, as we strive for the virtuous circle of fertility.

In Part 2 I'll discuss the hot topic of intervention, CIDRs, estrumate and the rest!

Calf Rearing: Laborious fun!

Today's post is all about rearing calves. Undoubtedly the most labour intensive task at this time of year!

Calf rearing at Tre Abbot

Now to start off I think I should admit I'm not an expert calf rearer. We run a simple system that suits our facilities and circumstances. There are many ways to rear calves and ultimately if you're happy with your calves and eventual heifers, then you're doing something right!

What I would say, however, is that I've seen calf rearing go wrong and have had to learn quickly which things can have the biggest positive effect on stock-person and animal.

With this in mind, here are my ground rules for calving in order of importance:

1) Colostrum: Every heifer calf is stomach tubed with 4 litres of colostrum within 6 hours of birth. Bulls with 2.5 litres. This is singly the most important thing you can do to improve calf health and mortality rates. Some may prefer to bottle feed, we stomach tube to keep the protocol easy and consistent for staff.

2) Cleanliness: Calves should always have clean bedding, clean forage to pick at, and if fed once a day, clean water to drink. This seems obvious, but fulfilling these requirements first requires good facilities. In the picture above you can see we use our silage clamp to house the calves. Straw bales are used to divide pens, encouraging calves to eat the clean straw walls, instead of soiled bedding. This space also provides good drainage and ease of access for bedding and feeding. In the past I've wasted a lot of time and energy trying to keep substandard pens clean.

3) Static groups: Calves should be grouped with similar aged animals, and not moved from their starting pen. It may be tempting to identify a "slow drinker" early on, and move it to a different group. But in doing so you run a risk. If that calf is burdened by something contagious, like scours or pneumonia, then you can quickly end up transferring this problem to a new group. We prefer to persevere with "slow" calves, and invariably they will eventually catch up.

Their are many other rules I could add to this list, but these are the essentials. My goal is to turn a fragile, milk dependant calf, into a cheap to keep weanling capable of growing well on grass. With this in mind here is a description of our rearing system:

Ad-lib concentrates with a coccidiostat offered throughout.

Day 0: 4L of colostrum

Day 1-10: 2.5L twice a day of whole milk

Day 11-Weaning*: 2.5L once a day, 500g CMR

*Calves can be weaned at 65Kg for a Friesian, but should be kept on ad-lib concentrates and straw until 85Kg.

Start weighing calves from 6 weeks old, if you can weigh a sample once a week it will have the added bonus of encouraging staff, as they can quantify their progress and see that "the end is in sight". 

Weighing this week has shown calves are growing at 1Kg/day, with the eldest group consuming 1.5Kg/day of concentrates.

Every herd will have its own challenges and health status. But I'm a great believer that keeping things simple and repeatable will give consistent results!

Emlyn

Residuals

Pre (3400KgDM) and Post (1400KgDM) Grazing heights in paddock 4

Grazing conditions have been excellent for the last 4 days. Cold winds have dried the farm, allowing cows to graze paddocks very well. Judging by the post grazing height, almost too well.

The two most important grazing rounds are the first and the last. In the first we try and graze out all the old winter growth, and the earlier we do this the better. Over winter grass enters a dormant phase where growth slows to a minimum, grass drymatter will increase, but overall herbage mass is static. Defoliation wakes the plant from this state and kick starts growth. Low residuals in the first round are particularly important, as any dead-matter in the sward is removed, maximising future growth and quality for subsequent rounds. If ever there was a time to treat cows a little meaner and graze harder, now is that time.

The exception to this rule is the above scenario, where residuals are under 1500KgDM. Here supplementing your grass with concentrates (or whatever you have locally) will have a high milk response and higher profitability than the decision to feed at other times. This is because:

1.) Cows grazing below 1500KgDM are telling you they are close to being underfed, they are close to their physical limit of grass utilisation. It stands to reason then, that feeding them more of a high quality feed will suddenly provide them with a higher net energy(ME) intake, and increase milk production.

2.) Lifting residuals to above 1500KgDM will result in faster regrowth as the grass is left with a higher reserve of sugars, from which to grow.

So this weeks grazing decision is obviously to supplement the grazing. Cows are being fed 4Kg of a 13ME, 14% Protein concentrate, along with roughly 1KgDM of average quality silage (10.5ME).

In a future post I'll discus energy intakes for grazing cattle, and how to think of grass purely as an energy source!

1000 Visits!

Just a short post today to let you all know the blog has passed 1000 page visits!

Table showing page visits by nation

Thanks to everyone who has stopped by, and for all the positive feedback I've received in the last month.

I hope to post at least fortnightly throughout the year, and try to cover as many topics as I can. I've tried to steer it away from being over technical and wonkish, to provide a broader appeal. But if more detail and figures are what you're after then here is a list of sites/sources I love to read and trawl:

http://www.agresearch.teagasc.ie/moorepark/
The Irish research farm Moorepark provides a fantastic starting point for pretty much any topic concerning grass based systems.

http://www.siddc.org.nz/lu-dairy-farm/
Lincoln University Dairy Farm, based in Canterbury, NZ. Check out their 'Focus Day' handouts, providing a wealth of information, and demonstrating just how much can be recorded and analysed on a farm.

http://side.org.nz/past-proceedings/
Past proceedings from the annual South Island Dairy Event in NZ. A huge number of topics are covered. One of the first sites I came across, and still keeping me occupied for hours!

http://www.dairynz.co.nz/
DairyNZ's website, particularly useful is the NZAEL section, which provides proofs for bulls based on BW.

I hope these sites prove as useful to you as they have been to myself.

Until next time, good luck and keep grazing!

Emlyn

Staffing your Seasonal Unit

In today's post I thought I'd discuss staffing on seasonal calving farms.

On an unrelated note, here's a recent picture of my 1 year old heifers, just to hold your interest:

Heifers cell grazing

As a spring calver I like to think I work twice as hard for half the year, then half as hard for the rest! Almost all the important, labour intensive tasks are focussed in the first six months of the year. We calve for 10 weeks, then we're straight into our DIY AI for another 6-8 weeks, before we can turn the bulls in and have a rest.

This all works OK(ish) with owner operators and equity/sharefarmers. We can work from Feb to mid April without a cow free day, including weekends. But really is this just a failure of our own management?

I recently heard that the goal of management was to make yourself redundant. I don't wholly agree with this, but it's an interesting point. One of the markers of the success of our management is how well things run in our absence. By this measure if I feel I can't take a day away from my farm for 70+ days, this would seem quite a failure.

But is seasonal calving a special case, that doesn't necessarily compare to other industries and wider management practises? At least one experienced person needs to be available round the clock, unless staff are onsite, which is rarely the case for small/medium operators in the UK, then this will fall to whoever lives in the farm house.

The other problem is that there is not an abundance of semi experienced causal labour that can be fairly employed for the 3-4 busiest months. We face the choice of either over staffing for the entire year, or under staffing, grinning and baring it. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between? 

We've recently taken on a relief milker for the morning milkings. So far it's working well, freeing up an extra pair of hands to either help with calf rearing or training heifers in the parlour. We've calved 33% in 14 days and so far we seem to be coping. I doubt I'll manage many more cow free days, but with my wife expecting our first child on April 11th hopefully I'll be forced to relax, manage better and spend as many days as I can getting to know my new baby daughter. Because ultimately those will prove the most important and memorable days of my whole seasonal calving calendar!

Emlyn