Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

good silage and a lorry load of meal, flake of straw to hold it together! thats what im at. autumns doin 7000. im telling myself they are leaving money behind them. iv a liquid contract which obviously helps. was talking to the meal rep one they and they said they were amazed at the amount of fellas calving down in the autumn with no contract.

50% autumn 50% spring calving here

zero grazing it here, cows absolutely love it. 1.95 kgs ms atm

feed to yield. average would be around that per day yes. be over 2 tonne fed this year. yeah 18% on silage.

I think you'll burn out faster on a split system, milking 365. Ask yourself would you like to be calving cows now and managing young calves. I think you need more labour with split calving.

you’ll burn out lot faster calving lot of cows in short period in spring ….throw in shite weather ….outbreaks of scour etc ….milked thru last 3 years …oad from late November to start calving around 12 Jan …..very relaxed

big push on fleikveigh (simmental) the last couple of years. i know one indoor herd doin well with them. one grazing/buffer feeding place not so well. heard some people say the norwegian red have a bad temperment? have you ever used normonde? its a french breed a i think . or the monty? know a few suckler men that swear by them!

it works well for me. i dont have the facilities to calf everything in one go. calf down mostly october november in autumn. i use a bull because the breeding clashes with calving in the spring. dont like sept calving because there not enough in the grass for fresh calvers and i cant really seperate them out to buffer feed.

not bother selling calves in fairness. although if you cant sell the calves in spring people will tell you you're doing something wrong that they have fellas ringing them looking for calves. still handy to not have as big a group if you have to hold onto them for a while.

i also have the big red box milking them so burnout isn't an issue. and i might aswell keep that yoke working!

one issue i think people over look is slurry storage. milker's create more slurry than dry cows because there drinking lots of water possibly. i wouldnt have an exact figure on this but iv heard people saying tanks were getting quicker.

@yewdairy i dont think im working harder. iv 2 8-10 week calving blocks. number of cows calving per day is handy for one gobshite show like here. if i tried to squeeze all into one period in the spring i dont think id cope tbh. cubicles have to be done anyway, cows have to be fed anyway. im just adding meal to the diet feeder for the milkers. once calves get good start there isnt that much work once you keep them moving. if things were different id consider all spring but im working with whats here

do you mean a midday feed of ration?

Just on the way up to it myself, sounds good..I didn't bother with the ploughing this year thought this would be something different.