Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

All family labour and that will continue

Ill do a breakdown on cost later on as I’ve already done it

60000 rent

45000 Silage and slurry contractors

30000Maize growing and harvesting not including land rent and fert

35000 fertiliser

10000 Ai

20000 vet

30000 Esb

15000Hp on machinery

10000 maintenance

6000 cars and phones

3000 plastic

6000Seed and spray

10000 milk replacer

18000 brewers grains

170000 meal

10000Detergents and parlour

Total costs 478000 excluding labour

200 cows producing 9250 delivered (will probably be higher)

At 30cpl 1850000 equals 555000

At 35cpl equals 647500

At 40 cpl equals 740000

At 45 cpl equals 832500

Over the last 5 years our avg milk price has been 49cpl

Now add

Sfp 45000

Sale of cull cows 40000

Sale of 35 heifers 70000

feel free to point out costs I’m missing

I hope it succeeds for you. Id be very interested in a walk through your system.

Was there ever a boards discussion group day out.

insurance is 10 k

Straw and bedding is 10k

Diesel is 18k

Accounts 4500
bringing total cost to 520500

Maize costs accounts for seed spray and plastic and contracting- no vat if contractor supplies all

170 for meal includes all stock

These figures are only for 3 times a day milking

When we do go to robots there will be 230 cows in the system 200 milking all the time

230 x 10500Litres will be 2415000 litres sold

However when on robots I will increase meal usage circa 100000

Repayments on robots will be 70k per annum

But revenue from sales of milk and stock will be up well over 200000 to cover extra coats

Have you any meas in people's mental health. First we had G2M with a zero grazer and now this like.

The numbers you are talking are just crazy. Too many zeros. Don't like the sound of repayments in general apart from property but maybe that's just me.

You say there is no extra labour cost but there is extra labour.

Your maize seems cheap.

Was talking to a man with robots the other day struggling with grazing and I asked him if he would just go indoors and he said no way. Too many problems indoors.

Maxing output is fine once your not just a busy fool. Have to watch the inputs too.

Just to be clear

those figures are only a 25% increase on our current operation

I really don’t understand how lads are worried about the costs- the returns of high input farm more than compensate for it

But Labour is also an input is the point I was trying to make.

Above example is a debt free farm, with all infrastructure and most machinery paid for, going of figures given, and probably in the top 100 dairy farms for ms delivered in the country, with a really good family team working together and access to good reasonable priced land on long-term leases, for the average farmer its not attainable, plus a 12c/l winter milk contract….

I’ll probably work part time

There you go. Not sustainable long term. When the derogation goes the wheels will come off. Committing to long term investments without long term security.

What happens if one of the free labour units gets sick.

more sustainable long term especially if derogation goes

Because of the high level of feed being fed and the treatment of native grain going forward a strategic alliance can be formed with a large local grain grower where his land will count towards my total ha for organic n like what is happening in France and Germany- why do you think there is no derogation in these countries???

If my brother or I go sick we would just deal with it like you would have to except this time we’d have the robots to continue to milk the cows- with the profits from the farm an investment in a robotic feeding system would help even future

reality is if derogation goes the low input grass based cow will be financially unviable

in the above costing I never mentioned that we have beef cattle in a seperate herd number( some going tomorrow) in future instead of putting the beef cattle into a different herd the replacements could be transferred to allow cow numbers to increase even further