Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

That was the point i made to her aswell. I dont make the prices. Valid point about the straw. Everyone is in the same boat there. I'm not going to cririse someone's breeding policy or how they farm. Thats they're business and if they are happy well and good. In fairness to her it's not her fault she has an off farm income or that she's milking OAD with the circumstances on the farm. I seen her on a few things and whether farmers like it or not we need well spoken people to highlight the industry, whether we agree with what they say or not!!

I don't footbathe and I don't want to have to start.

Straw made €50 around here last year....The tillage man, said (like those on here) that's the market price of it, he has to mind his own business, he has no responsibility to the dairy lad, the dairy lad can stick it up his hoooool.

TThe dairy lad now has straw booked for this summer from Spain at €220 per tonne delivered.

Sometimes people make changes for economic reasons and can break links to existing supply lines.

Maybe the article meant little more than this. There are ways of splitting cost with a colleague.

There is no surer way of calves being at a fiver again in 3 years time than removing the competition through economic incapacity.

His FRX cross calves were the first of his calves I imagine. Calves really only took off from mid March this year. There seems to get a good few dairy farmers that looked after regular buyers this year to some extent or other. The reason for that was many of these were calf to sub 2 year old beef and may never benefit from the upturn in beef prices.

What was the value of Frx calves this year. On most places they averaged 60-100. Most HO friesians did not do mu h better. Not sure how many @daiymann 5 had of them. I think you missed his point where it was his blacks normally went for 100 euro but these along with his HE and BB sold well this year. This was the way the year went. From mid March calves took off.

Ya and if you are buying them similar to a lot of calves es you have to be careful. It's abit like buying weanlings off sucklers buy the wrong ones and you end up with a pneumonia issue.

Calf prices similar to straw prices etc ate all dictated by the market. Up until this year unless you had a tight system beef was a tough game. Decent margin if done right but if you were careless you lost your shirt. Something like 80% of calf rearers last less than 5 years. Daiymann has a point about looking after regular buyers to an extent. There us a good few lads gone calf rearing this year who will not be at it in 3 years time.

On the lady round OAD with a JEX cow and a lower quality calf it's all about priorities. The day gig is probably exceptionally well paid. I worked and farmed for years. It was all about priority. It how I ended up with mainly dairy ans dairyX cattle. They were easy to manage and relatively easyvto buy.

Investment is a factory as well. I often point this out to other farmers. I used to put 60 stores in for 33-36k untill a couple of years ago. Last year when I had to stock the new placeI dropped further down in the market. If you look at calves there us a significant difference in buying 50 or 100 calves at 100, 200, 300 or 400 euro.

The calves @ 400/ head may be more profitable ( although I would question it) but having 10or15k extra tied up in 50 calves is an issue to consider as well.

If it's bad enough then you may take them off milk for about three feeds and feed electrolytes such as Lectade. Flushes out any bugs and they get immune to any bugs then. If you don't think you need to go there then black boluses with charcoal, clay, seaweed, etc for about three days or so. It's the time of year and the calf housing. Really any late calves would need to be going into fresh housing where there were no calves at all this year. Very difficult have all these different houses though.

foothbath here every 3 weeks for 3 milkings …purely as preventative …no obvious motto problem …keeps hooves healthy

Gill seems nice in fairness. More like the media taking advantage of her good nature. She should leave them feck off. She has enough on her plate.

she penned the article and headline was generated from its content …I’m sure she is a nice person but she can’t just distance herself from the article

The high cell count ladies, would they be a throw-over from your days using irish bulls with poor health/confirmation traits, it's alarming the state of a batch of second lactation heifers here that where bred of a ballymaddock stock bull feet and udders are basically shoot on them...

Was terrifying how one cross back to Irish genetics produced the above

small suckler farmer here, closed herd for 12 years.

A 22 month old bullock went down in test last month with a single lesion then confirmed on kill out.

He clearly went into the shed with it in Oct with all the other cattle. Yet he the only one.

I have an old shed in the yard. I might clean it out and put the last few in there. I got test carried out on the what's coming out of the calves but it tested negative for all viral scours.

I would say Jamie is probably one of the greatest dairy farmers I have seen - he fed a lot of meal last year as he was gearing up for a dispersal sale- why can’t everyone do what he did if ebi is so good

The point is Irish high ebi bulls delivery very profitable high output herds when managed well.

There will always be a difference between farms that have the same genetics due to the management on individual farms.

Genomically tested this years batch of 1st calvers on the us index, results speaked for themselves, theirs a serious amount of lies and misleading data how international bulls are converted over, hammering international bulls on fert/solids % etc simply to turn lads of them

You should see the genomics on the really poor Irish bred ones of a topclass ebi bulls, their shocking

They're health trait and type scores, combined with no milk is a huge glaring issue

Whats interesting is that when he fed more he improved his calving interval and produced significantly more milk solids per cow in a very challenging year. What people aren't mentioning is that the average milk solids is 410 kgs and the average ebi is 181 and while the average Ebi is increasing the average milk solids is not. Was at a signpost meeting yesterday and Teagasc are now pushing for more milk per cow. Alot of high stocked grass based farms now have diet feeders and are buffering alot of the year to maintain their stocking rates and in some cases are feeding the same as me but 100kg less ms per cow produced, they simply don't have the genetics to produce it. It will be interesting if going forward if herds increasing their ebi constantly will be able to improve ms production while maintaining a good calving interval.