Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

Can ye give it a rest for Christmas day, worse than kids, willy waving, my cow's better than yours.....

In fairness to your father he put an awful lot of work into your herd, it just didnt arrive there. There are other lads who post here without blowing, who have started out on their own back and can rightfully take the praise themselves. Alot of the time its teamwork. And there's no I in team. Happy Christmas

Compare 100 middle band spring calvers delivering 550+ kgms to 100 of your type cows and I think you’d find for time input, difference in buffering etc the return at the end of the day would be negligible.

The scenario you painted is very skewed high yielders vs what some people could achieve nearly milking once a day with a spring calving herd.

If you’re achieving towards the high 550s from predominantly grass with little buffering compared to you achieving around 700 with far more buffering, more land needed to carry the cows and for maize or wholecrop etc, then at the end of the day I can’t see there being much difference in margin between the two systems if both are carrying same number of cows.

Some thing I remember from my old ag college days what an old lecturer use to say regularly, “every man is outstanding in his own field” but there is always room for learning and adapting. Not everything is one road, worked at cows for a number of years in Autumn and spring calving herd of high yielding cows and Autumn calving was the easiest time compared to spring time with calf scour, field work, calving cows etc. the key to winter milk is facilities and machinery and milking parlour.

Actually less land required if your growing maize as it consistently delivers over 20 ton dm per hectare- 33% more than the top 10% of grass growers

ill do a figure for 700kg ms vs 550 spring later on after I digest the grub

I'd be thinking more long term with land purchase Vs rent. Have buy to let's also and they can be a pain. Houses at 100k will be the first to be empty when the recession comes. Land costing about 10 - 12k per acre around here. Houses costing 250k for anything decent and they are rent capped mostly. Way more security and flexibility in land and less risk. You couldn't rent an acre in my locality and even if you wanted to you couldn't be expanding depending on land availability.

My calculations are not flawed- results from the profit monitors show that the best 10% of farmers in each system low medium and high input all make the same profit per litre regardless of % of milk composition- what this does show and teagasc don’t want people to realise is that more volume sold generates more profit

the 1.7 million extra capital required to milk 264 medium output vs 160 high output is real I’m afraid

i was lucky to study economics in college

It hasn’t happened over night

634 one of our worst years in recent time- drought really hit us hard

4.34 fat

3.67 protein

7688 litres

I’ve already posted it previously have a look thru my previous posts- why do you not want to believe me

Besides what anyone else says you’ve still got outstanding figures and great cows. You know your cows inside out like any of my friends with pedigree herds they could tell you the background of everyone of them in the parlour.

Its something to take great pride in yourself and your brother carrying on what your father started and improving it.

Hope you and your family are having a great Christmas its special to have a family farm with multiple brothers involved and stock you can be proud of.

I think thats uncharitable straight. Stan is after posting coop reports and some of his individual cow data.

They are obviously a fantastic herd but Im not sure the system would be for me. I like the few weeks down time but thats possibly because I work part time off farm two and a bit days a week and that in terms of output would be the same as an extra 60+ cows a year. Each farmer develops a system to suit themselves.