Zero grazing

Grueller wrote: »

No only milking this year. I absolutely love it so far. The lockdown gave me the taste of full time farming and I am destroyed ever since. Nothing else will do now.

When poverty comes in the window love flies out the door

Just on the 18acres about a mile away from you. I see a neighbour milking about 55 cows on a platform of 35 acres he has another block about the same distance away as you. He recently bought a small zero grazer second hand. It doesn't seem much of a chore to bring a load of grass nearly every day at present. He carries out a small bit of contracting as well. He makes all bale silage and really works on quality of it. He has switched between maize and crimped barley over the years but has moved away from the maize and stuck with the barley as he can do this himself on another block of land he has. He seems to be happy enough with the system at present

Injuryprone wrote: »

Moving the herd to the 80 acres is the only option imo, if you're going dairy only. My main reasoning would be, as others have touched on, the slurry problem.

If you are harvesting feed from the 80 acres, be it by zero grazing/maize/wholecrop whatever, then all your slurry will have to be going to the 80 acres. Your home farm would be very, very highly stocked so you shouldn't really be spreading anything bar parlour washings at home. Drawing all your slurry a 14 mile round trip would be an eye-watering cost, I'd guess it'd be at least 5 times the cost of spreading in land adjoining the yard.

Harvesting your winter feed at the home farm where all your slurry is stored would be a much simpler setup.

On the other side of the coin, I'm guessing not much slurry has been drawn to the outfarm in a while, so what are the indexes like? Also what is the infrastructure like? People are talking about the cost of a cheap parlour/washings tank. But if you have to sort out roadways, fencing, water, soil indexes as well then you're talking a different story.

No matter what way you go there are costs and time involved. The place a mile away would take a good bit of the slurry. I'd expect you spread some there. The 18 acres would need 4-5k gallons of slurry/acre/year. As the 80acres would have a drystock, rearing replacement's etc it might not be required for massive amounts of slurry.

The only reason he need to move the milking platform is if he goes beyond 70 cows the economics are marginal when costs and time are taken into account. Install roadways, paddock it for dairying, install extra water troughs etc and costs coin fast. For slurry being carried to it install a cheap storage lagoon to hold 50k gallons. Pig farmers use tanker trucks to move slurry. I think the cost is about 60/ hour. A truck would do that return in about 40 minutes. You have to spread it straight away but it would be an option vis a via moving herd

Mf310 wrote: »

Just came across this thread while searching zerograzing, not sure how I completely missed it in September, a lot of knowledge in it. Done a nice bit of zerograzing this year from the contractor , stocked on milking platform here at 3.5/HA and will be at 4/HA next year. The Cost of getting zero grazing done by contractor has drove me to the decision of buying something myself next year or changing system to multicut silage as MJ says. 75€ inc vat per load came just under €4000, for 50 loads of grass I felt it was steep and would make a fair repayment on a zerograzer or as Im doing so few loads even a good second hand at 15000€ would be value. Ive also buffer fed throughout the year with high dmd quality bales and felt cows performed better on it and it definitely helped keep yields up rather than drawing wet loads of grass in August/September.
My only thing against the multi cut silage system is residuals in paddocks , id be thinking it would be impossible to get cows to graze out paddocks when id be buffer feeding with the quality silage? Would be interested to hear about your system MJ and Jaymla would I be right in saying your both heavily stocked?

I can never understand farmers facination with another man making a margin. The 75/load includes diseal and labour. Assuming the contractor is vat rated, there is about 9 euro in vat one the 75 euro. I am assuming there is 1.5 hours work to the contractor, most tractor drivers if fulltime with a contractor are on 15/ hour. Add on holiday pay and employer PRSI it's at least a 20/hour cost. So vat and labour is making up over half the cost.

This idea that 4k a s serious money towards machinery is not really looking at the picture long term. Usually lads underestimate the price of what they are buying. A contractor machine is bigger and his tractor is bigger and faster, as well maintenance is his specialty. If something happens to the machine you will struggle to fix it fast enough to keep you grass drawn to the cows..

But looking at it logically the machine will probably cost you more than 15K, even without interest it will be 4 years net before running costs before pay back. The machine you buy will be smaller than a contractor machine and will require 7-8 loads where he is doing 5 runs. If you require 50 loads done by him it will be 75 by your machine maybe more. You are looking at adding up to one hundred hours onto your workload every year. By the time diesel and tractor as well as machinery wear and tear is allowed for you are looking at a 6 year pay back. Valuing your time at 10 euro per hour pushes payback out to 10 years. I am not sure if I work a a thousand hours for 10 euro an hour to own a bit of scrap at the end of ten years

You planning to up your stocking levels if the business cannot stand the cost of paying contracting where it makes sense forget about expansion. Zero grazing will be on the shoulders of the year mostly in spring you be under pressure. WTF would you, there is too many idiots in the game as it is why join them. Lads pouring ration down cattle's gullet's all winter to give Larry beef with no margin.

Remember it a long way to 70 years of age and you could be farming that long