Dairy Calves 2024

Seems to be only with bobbying on the farm. The wind is turning on this world wide

Bit disingenuous having him on promoting them. He must be another friend of Mr child's.

I'll look forward so to the day that they have sobac on for a promotion so.

You won't get them for 500 this year. Money for jam.

Why the poor mouth and the bumming of calves out of all the beef farmers so... 🤣

I don't quite get the concern about dairy farmers not being able to rear a few calves. There are still plenty of people who keep their calves and finish to slaughter anyway.

Even those that went more specialised into dairy over the last decade or so have hardly forgotten how to feed a few calves. You grow up feeding calves twice a day with a bucket as your first job as a child when the child growing up on the suckler farm might look across the hedge at the bottom of the garden to count the animals a few days a month.

Even for the lads who expanded up to hundreds of cows now, the computerised feeding systems aren't overly expensive (for them). They can afford proper facilities as well. If you have a proper setup you can look after a lot of calves properly without too much labour or time.

Same here. I found it worked wonders on getting awkward calves to drink too.

Nitrates

From a nitrogen point of view for someone stocked to their limit.

50 calves for 1 month would excrete 98kgs of N, so the same as a cow for a year depending on banding.

The bigger worry for those people would be derogation going to 220kg and high yielding cows up to the 106kg. The man who used to have 3 cows/Ha is going to only have 2 on that same Ha.

Not everyone is in derogation though. Or some kept out of it by exporting. Exporting will be more difficult but even if it is no longer possible to keep under the 170, you still have a bit of headroom there before the 220.

Around here there would be few and far between dairy farmers that would have less than 100 dairy cows. I guess it would be hard to make a living on any less. There is plenty of suckler farmers around with 50 cows or less and they seem to be doing OK. Now they would have other enterprises going like maybe sheep (not paying well at the minute) or they would be feeding dairy calves or stores to beef, some have a bit of tillage or they do a bit of contracting. Milking cows is a full time job and doesn't leave much time of other enterprises, so if the dairy farmer is going to have to keep bull calves for longer it is going to put a lot more pressure on their time, they haven't even time to go to the mart to sell the bull calves at the minute. As said above the change in the nitrates rules will also have a big impact on the numbers of cows farmers can keep, so with calves around longer they be under pressure here also.

Was talking to a lad that provides advise to farmers in the UK and Ireland, I was saying to him that in the North and UK you see nearly all Holstein cows unlike here with the Jex cows. He said the UK farmers want volume from less cows where as in the south it is solids from more cows but with the tightening up of nitrates and having to keep calves longer you could see a switch back to a cow producing a larger volume of milk.