Great Post.
No one can be too haughty about mental health. If every one is honest, most people goes through a bad patch, it might last a day, month, years. My favourite saying is " everything is transient". I have known a few people down the years and was very surprised as some were happy go lucky and top of their game. So try to go easy on yourselfs and don't be worried about grass or scc or relationships, time sorts things out.
I beginning to sound like a Buddhist monk.
If you’re spring calving and want to dry off over Christmas compact calving is essential. It’s just lost days in milk other wise and lost income. If you’re happy to milk through then don’t worry about it. I’m quite happy to follow it and when I started out at home it and proper grassland management has what’s really made the biggest difference
The thing with the Teagasc gospel is all the deadlines, compact calving, Spring rotation planner, high ebi bulls, grass measuring. If you don't meet those targets it doesn't make you a bad farmer. At the end of the day it makes very little difference to the success of the business. The only thing that matters is money going out versus money coming in and there are several different ways to achieve that.
Ai man was saying this morning, you spend thefirst t 3 weeks of the season trying to serve as many cows as possible and then dreading the time after with repeats
That's what I think too. So why are people leaving for private advisors is what I'm wondering
But why would anybody be taking advice from Teagasc or anybody else for that matter. Our fathers got on fine doing their own thing and so can we. It doesen't have to be by the book.
Sounds like the misfortune got caught up in the hype. There's no fear of our own man @older by the day winning farmer of the year.
The belittling from teagasc and Co is unreal. There seems to be no more room for mediocrity, you just have to be excellent now to make money from it.
They want cows with high maintenance and beef figures. Charolais calves then just to make them saleable like. Nothing about the calf being profitable for the dairy farmer. They'd drive you to the drink.
Alot of lads I know are gone to private advisors now but I can't figure out why. Are they cheaper or what? One guy I know thinks he doesn't have to grass measure if he's not with teagasc.
I go to football, talk shite. Nothing about farming. Clear the head. Noticed a good few farming people don't stay for games etc anymore- maybe they dont want to talk to me- but it's great to get away from the farm for a while, it'll still be there when you get back
For all the copying of the kiwi model, I wonder if many advisors know about this mental health website for NZ farmers: https://farmstrong.co.nz
There's a dozen cliches about minding yourself, but one thing that stays with me is 'Farmers need farmers'. We could manage without advisors, salesmen, co-op managers, etc. - they're not our peers. But a 2-min chat with another farmer is worth 20 self-help, mind-yourself videos.
I find "talking" on here great. It's not like a pint and a laugh in the pub, but it's still a chat with other farmers. I'm always praising the farming forum on boards to anyone who'll listen.
Was more than likely just a trigger, expensive spring/milk volumes on the floor, weather still very variable, exhausted from working 90 plus hour weeks, combine that with peak milk cheques barely making a dent in paying bills racked up over the winter/spring, and intrest rates on highly borrowed large units crippling them, where 40k was going out to cover intrest now over 80k…
Its a wonder we arent expirencing alot more
There's one thing that's not really talked about by farm advisors and teagasc with dairying and that's mental health and suicide. It's the most mundane, most labour taking, most repetitive day after day, most cash taking for improving facilities for new regulations, most socially isolating professions going.
I probably have it slighty wrong and if it is to protect their identity then it's no harm.
Heard of a farmer suicide. A dairy farmer in his 20's. Herd gone to 600 cows. He couldn't get labour over the weekend. If that's the cause and it would cause anyone to flip. But he took his own life days after.
If going well he'd probably meet the teagasc parimeters for farmer of the year and an aim that the rest of farmers are supposed to aim for. When it doesn't though it can be hell on earth. And no teagasc advisor or product salespeople or coop milk managers are going to milk those cows for you.
well if they go that route they can shove there yearly sun for me where sun don’t shine ….bulls I’m all using are carbon negative because it dosnt suit the kiwi model there ramming down our neck for years ….this will be a step too far for lots
They'd want to rein themselves in, theirs a test now available with milk samples to give a individual methane efficeny index for cows, obviously the incarnation they come up will favour their type of genetics and hammer higher yielding herds, they deserve to be brought infront of a judge if they go a step-further with another airy fairy index thats not actually accurate
I hear teagasc are trying to come up with a mechanism to penalise herds with a high carbon figure.
What is the story with teagasc and Ifj never mentioning Friesian. Is it that they can't pronounce the word or what.
They talk about jersey, crossbred or black and white. WTF is black and whites like?
Goof grass weather atm
Haven't seen any posts from @Mooooo in a while. Hope all's ok. Weather was pretty bad down there
Yes straw can be hard to get into them, and at todays straw prices the hulls are cheaper. I remember dumping trailer loads of hulls into dung heaps when the dryer was on oats, now it has a value!
Interestingly there’s a brioch factory near here that produce a high starch (66%) byproduct that’s highly palatable. They produce a few hundred tons per month and had problems selling it on. All going to Ireland now. Great product but if feeding more than 1.5kg it’ll blow the feet off cows. I suppose it’ll be mixed into dairy/finisher rations.
Why would you want to go to Galway to get one. The local lads in Abbeydorney sell them.
any of ye ever hear anything about these before? Would be a handy machine around a dairy farm! Price looks too good to be true. A 8.8 tonne machine
https://www.donedeal.ie/view/35604274
It is but its a really useful product, cows love it too, versus trying to get straw into them and the messing with sorting in the tmr
Feck!
Big money for something destined for the dung heap.
90 a ton delivered
Do you get the oat hulls for free?
mixing oat hulls here trough some baled silage, and 2kgs of nuts in a tmr, bf is hovering around 4% so seems to be working/dungs are good too
Spring 29.2 3.99fat 3.40 pr
Autumn 22.1 4.54fat 3.47pr 193 DIM
Usual struggle with grass quality. Was down 3% supply for the year up to April. Didn't look after that.
Anyone leaving hay out to milkers? Have no straw
Cut the straw a bit shorter so that the green button in the sheath is sitting right on the end of the gun.
I find the special heifer gun and sheaths a gift for tricky cases, and you can re use the special sheaths if you don't ram the straw in to the last. If I'd a few id load up a regular sheath and a heifer one and start with the regular one.
Mine aren't rising, down on last year between numbers and yield
How is supply looking lads with ye all. I was back 13% annually until mid April, but am up 9% on May last Yr so am now only 4.5% behind last years supply to date. Coops may recover as the year moves on.
Easiest thing I find is go in a bit earlier than usual obviously doesn't suit with sexed but it never caused issues with ordinary straws
Leave out a drop of semen to open it up.
