Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

Bought enough fert this morning of a local merchant to get us to after 1st cut next year, 460 a ton for 24-2.5-5 payment on delivery, its a saucy price but I can't see fert prices dropping till next summer before taking into account at what price if at all you'll buy it for next spring

That's a big call. Hard to know. How are tillage farmers going to manage as they are heavy users. Will this China thing cause the price to collapse? If the whole of Europe can't heat their homes there will be WW3. And all the coal power plants shut down.

Fair dues.

You won’t see any great benefit until after a good dry spell. The day or two before it rains get out with the grass harrow…serious bang for buck.

The ground gets a massive burst of nitrogen following a serious heat stressed drought I've always noticed, and July this year was 27degrees and grass properly burning up. My guess would be that a) you have no grass growth that month so all the nitrogen stays in the soil, b) the ground cracks up and realises more residue nitrogen that was in the soil once the rain comes, c) lads start to panic when growth on the floor and lash out the bag nitrogen during the height of the drought, and being realistic this isn't needed. Combination of all 3 probably explains them cows in my view . The growth rates of 80 are due to soil temperatures still being well up, plus basically an Indian summer, and all that nitrogen being used up. I'm grazing covers of 2500+ at the minute, very low rainfall during September is the main saving grace here, otherwise I wouldn't have a hope of utalising them covers, but when your given this gift by the weather bloody well use it, I can see myself needing a months less fodder already this winter because as things stand I'll get to graze most of October, whereas last 2 winters I was feeding heavy for both Octobers.

I'd be weary tho, fert prices have never been as high. Steel prices are starting to relax.

A dying breed here too. Down to about 1 dairy farmer per townland on average. Yet all we hear about in the media is new entrants. Limiting of the stocking rates will be the nail in the coffin for alot of them. I was supposed to buy a bigger milk tank but I'll be at least postponing that for a while.

Retirement scheme for glanbia was apparently oversubscribed, and not all applications where accepted they took in 237, with the latest nitrates plans been brought in for 2023 I'd reckon they'd have no bother getting the same again to pull the pin....

Sad reality is their is a core group of suppliers borrowed to the hilt myself included that simply can't pack it in, and this group is what the co-ops are banking on keeping the milk flowing

Why would they not accept more retirements and leave lads keen to supply milk short of peak milk litres?..that doesn't make sense to me.

With most of the retirements I have seen around here, the litres they would have been supplying is dwarfed by the expansion the bigger suppliers are making.

It seems to me that maybe milk production is moving to the better land, eg. wexford,kilkenny,carlow,tipping,waterford etc. And the larger farms on good land in the Midlands and North east.

Where during the quota years they didn't need to bother milking cows because they could make a good living much easier from tillage and beef.

Ah OK that makes sense, wonder what criteria they used for refusing somebody entry to the scheme, would be a bit unfair if you were forced to retire on health grounds or the like and didn't get in.

The government have lost the plot to be honest and the final nail in the coffin is the couple of odd hundred million with it been estimated the final bill could be over the billion in special covid bonuses they are going to pay out to front line workers.

The sooner the better the imf come back into town before the national debt gets to levels that will leave us as a basketcase country, the crowd at the minute are spending like a teenager that's got their hands on the parents credit card and has a online shopping addiction

All staff are safe, but everything (plant and stock) seems to be destroyed.

They might be able to get other processor to take their milk for the winter/spring months but when peak milk hits depending on processing capacity it could get messy,bigger issue is Glenisk paid a huge premium for organic winter milk from memory 55-60 cent a litre, from October-march, the hit to incomes having to take 35 cent base price will be fairly severe

I dunno, Blackrock, the worlds biggest hedge fund already buying into Chinese equity's again right now. Yep there will be plenty of economic crashes still to come, but you usually don't see a mirror of the previous crash, the Chinese will have certainly learnt from the Global financial crash. Watching a video of afew high rise concrete shells being knocked down certainly wouldn't influence me when you're looking at a country the scale of China.

its a great little country we live in, they seriously need to do a value for money audit on teagasc some of those salaries are off the chart.....

from my experience going the green cert the education is shocking, lecturers spent to much time doing phd and are a bit out of touch to what it takes to run a comercial farm

how many farmers actually use teagasc services, i think its only a very small %