Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

Looking back at the coverage yesterday, we can thank Ryan and Noel immensely. They stole the media lime light in a massive way and completely took all the heat away from the the farm orgs and the industry. The issue now seems to be in the ether of the ag industry.

The ball is now in the court firmly of the dairy and beef industry aswell as DAFM to work on a plan to deal with the calf issue. Time to act quick now and get on the front foot. We have dodged the media bullet. Solutions that can work on farms, not just policy. Every dairy farm has to up its game on calf quality, but some more than others.

The last calf of the season was born here about 6 weeks ago. A nice whitehead bull. His front legs are wonky. Perfectly healthy otherwise. Vet was out to something yesterday and had a look at him. She said do you know most farmers would have had that calf shot weeks ago. I was saying it's Perfectly healthy otherwise, why shoot it. I'm giving him a chance, it's the way I was brought up

Nonsense, it will matter. Smashing beef calves are possible from smaller cows with the right beef bull. Calves off big whitey Holstein dams are hard to finish without a pile of meal!

You can have what you’d call Irish freisans too that are you’re middle of the road Friesan not overly holestein and plenty power to them that will deliver a decent calf and solids without being pumped with feed and being minded like babies.

Crossbred cows will always deliver smaller calves you can’t deny that, they may turn into nice calves but you will have to do them very well.

1/4 of our cows would be crossbred, we keep every calf every year. It is easy to pick out the calves out of the crossbred cows they are just that bit more slight but hardy out.

They only tend to even out with the rest after their first winter once they hit grass again. You’ll never get the value of them as calves.

The big issue is regardless if you put an aubrac or something similar is a jex or frx cow they will still come out black. As the vast majority of farmers won’t be holding onto calves these calves still at a month old when basically weaned will still make pittance once the board says Dam is frx or jex.

Its hard to know what the answer to this whole problem will be but more poor quality beef animals and increased number of heifers diluting the value of heifers will all be negative for Irish farming.

Could also be said the introduction of jex and kiwi genetics had done huge damage to our traditional beef breeds in that the offspring from these genetics for most part are of poor quality

hardly as simple as saying the switch to smaller framed cows has stopped farms going broke …methods ,feeding and management could of played bigger role

we really need to listen to the farmers rearing cattle ,feeding and buying these dairy bred calves as to what they want ….rather than just expecting them to take what we give them

You played right into the factory’s hands so and done exactly what they wanted you to do. They’ve probably bought 90%+ of your factory fit stock since that day at €100 per head less than they’d have had to give you in the factory.

I was at Pat Aherne's open event this evening.

Pat is practicing foliar feeding, using zeolite and using homeopathy on his dairy herd. Multispecies swards and whole crop silage.

Jasus Phil if your going to throw shade at Ray and Andrew you have to acknowledge your local dairy empire builder as the model of dirty dairy. Sher isn’t the joke locally the **** tanker stops long enough in winter to just about ate the Christmas dinner.

Didn’t see this post until now hence the late reply

You know nothing about me .

Why do some of the posters on here routinely default to attacking the messenger as if that will deal with the issues raised ? There must be a belief amongst some of you that anyone calling out the obvious cruelty is an animal rights activist and should therefore be ignored.

Six foot of soil does us all in the end.

Empires never last.

I'm all for capping land per farmer. Never happen though no matter the enterprise. The day of the messing with tankers and thinking you're above it to is over now. If you don't have the storage you won't be in business. It's govs way now of reducing livestock.

All talk of leaving bps and going it without is pointless. Bord Bia and Councils and possibly epa down the line themselves with inspections that's the first thing they'll be after is storage. Eventually it possibly could be for entire housing period. If you look at it like it's their way of closing down and thining out livestock farms then you're in the correct frame of mind and are prepared and won't be surprised or caught unawares.

If derogation is scrapped, in 2025 and a farm can't access additional land/its not financially viable to rent extra acres, then any operations with huge loans for slurry infrastructure for say a 250 cow herd now been forced back down to under 150 will be paying back probably the guts of over a 1000 euro a cow plus intrest on 100 cows that can't be kept on farm anymore......

Taking out 7-15 year loans for infrastructure to be compliant for current cow numbers that likely won't be milked past 2025 is lunacy, if the department came out and laid the exact framework going forward x stocking rate allowable, x storage required per cow, and no deviation our updates made to this for a 10 year period the money would be spent on 90% of farms to remain compliant, but this yearly merry-go-round of new rules and regulations and the epa holding huge sway with their water reports they can torpedo any hopes of a new derogation for 2026 leaves us all in no man's land

What happened your 3 cows/Ha?