Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

Bord bia won't accept a bucket plant nor will the processor.

And cull cows you'd have to allow 60% are culled with high cell count.

Not sure if the post was tongue in cheek..

Is there a Mrs Siamsa? And if so what does she make of the plan?……

cull cows are not for the faint hearted ,cull cow men paid big money for cows earlier in the year expecting 5 euro/kg in June when in fact cows only peaked at 4.40 .You might see grand cows selling for handy money around the ring but dare you bid ,they will leave you buy plenty of canners but there is someone on every good cow and they take their turn

This accelerated cap ex is only for slurry storage so would be for the tank, slats and associated concrete around the tank. Carefully and clever planning could leave it in a way that the shed could be put easily over it. For example setting shortened stanchions or having pads set under some insulation and capped off with 3 inches of concrete which could be kangoed out easily at a later date.

Its worse your improving

Beef game in general is not for the faint hearted. I never did cows but there is a serious margin on a lot of cows going through the mart at present. The money is too tight in the sub three month game. But if you can carry the risk and a grass based system there is a decent margin in it. Lads with beef in general in the 3 month game got caught by there greed in the early part of last summer. Lads were expecting a base of 5.5-6/kg.

The dealers cannot handle the online buyer. It's a patience game. You just need a labtop rather than a phone especially at cows. He has only to shove the market by 20-30/ cow and they have to let him buy some after a while.

You might make a few mistakes but as Albert Johnson said it's seldom that an online buyer comes and says cattle are worse than he expected. Mostly they say the opposite.

You just push the market by 6-10%. If I was around the ring they can mess too much with me.

The investment needed for beef is about 30-50% of that need for dairying. Beef gives the option of carrying on with your PAYE job. Admittedly beef is a hard nosed game it just a lot of lads can not see the numbers.

Cows coming straight from the parlour on a good diet will need to be milked 5 times at least to dry them off properly otherwise you are looking at mastitis. I know one cull cow man that has put an old parlour back into action to dry off cows. Ya you have to reduce the diet but you need to milk them out a few time to dry out them out right especially if they are going on slats for the winter. It's a lot easier to do that now than be cutting/budizeering tits off in 6-8 weeks time.

While Gortnalea has most of the cows on a Thursday now there was 16-18 cows there still Friday morning. 10 were friesians under 5 years of age and they nearly all sold for under a euro a kg, another 3-4 were under 10 years of age priced similarly.

I have all my stores nearby bought for this year. If I had not I be buying some of those younger cows. There is a gross margin of 800+/head between now and next June.

There is more and more opportunities arising out of by-products of the dairy industry.

And watch your cell counts hit the roof.

Many of those cows will be being culled for good reason.

There are a lot of benefits to running a closed herd

What's the story now with importing stock from the uk? Have the rules changed. Your man David Clarke used to import alot

I have a mate that does this. Has 50 cows of his own and milks up to 300 culls at peak

has dry culls then aswell

he says the milking pays for the fattening of them and the profit is in the kill price

JK?