Dairy Chit Chat- Please read Mod note in post #1

Dawggone wrote: »

The Irish have got the message with the new world market scenario...get bigger or get out. The French haven't.
I listened to a dairy farmer from Brittany this morning bitching and moaning about how he can't make ends meet now and in the late 90's he was comfortable enough to put his children through Uni.

But what happens dawg when your successor is bitching and moaning about not having a viable income off your cabbage patch? Is the answer expand expand expand??

Dawggone wrote: »

I can only speak of France Clyde.
Ireland and France traditionally had very close ties because of farm/ herd size.

The Irish have got the message with the new world market scenario...get bigger or get out. The French haven't.
I listened to a dairy farmer from Brittany this morning bitching and moaning about how he can't make ends meet now and in the late 90's he was comfortable enough to put his children through Uni.

My two sisters were put through college that time too so f'n what? Time's change. No business can prosper on the same output over a twenty year period. Trying not to shoot the messenger here dawg but some people need to grow up a bit.

Muckit wrote: »

But what happens dawg when your successor is bitching and moaning about not having a viable income off your cabbage patch? Is the answer expand expand expand??

Afraid so, it's either get bigger or get out. Same as every other farming enterprise has been doing and carrying the cost of for the last 30 years

blackdog1 wrote: »

Farming families should be looked after in my opinion. You can't have enough of them in the country and they should be protected by the government. Farming families don't use social welfare,they pay their tax, they educate all their children who generally are hard working and get a job and for every 10 Euro they earn I'd say 8-9 gets spent back in the local economy. Big farms in my opinion don't help the economy one bit.

I'm afraid it's government protection in the form of the intervention, SFP / CAP and it's worldwide equivalents which has got us into the commodity cul-de-sac we are in today.

The misplaced desire for cheap food, and the agri-industry which has grown up around it - has got us to a place where it's perfectly normal that we milk cows in Ireland to send powder to china, and every morsel of food in the US travels 1500 miles from field to fork - but it's next to impossible to find a farming family able to feed themselves even 50% of the time from their own land, or to find a traditional family sized farm able to generate sufficient income on it's own merits to buy, clothe, house and feed the family that lives and works on it.

Think about it for a minute - it's absurd.

The industry of which we are a much abused part has - in the modern era - made a billion people clinically obese, while another billion people are starving - if we have a moral obligation to feed the world (and I'm not sure we do) this certainly isn't the way to go about doing it.

The reality is that we have been quietly turned from farmers into miners - dependent on extracting as much as possible at minimum price from whatever resources we can lay claim to and almost wholly removed from the markets which set prices for what we can produce. And - like all miners - we must invest, risk, and tool up with bigger and bigger machinery to stand even a half chance of being in the game when the dice is rolled for the next round of the cycle.

You are right we need protection from government, but please no more protection by government!

RightTurnClyde wrote: »

I was at a talk recently, and the guy talking was just back from the states. A discussion about the family farm and how it has to survive. The speaker refered to one of the farms he was at in the states, 2500 cows. Grandad, did calf sales, mother and father were the owners, two sons in their early 20s involved, one a vet the other management. They had 11 employees which included 2 couples. All worked very sociable hours. All employees were married or settled locally with kids schooled locally.
All very involved in the local community.
Is this not a family farm.
I'm not advocating our idea of a family farm or theirs. Just saying, our vision of a family may not be the only one.

I think you're quite right, it can't just be a question of size, I wonder if it isn't actually a question of a business sufficiently integrated or diversified to give the family reasonable control of their income and a sensible return on investment.

We know little about it but it sounds like the family in question has set the farm up so that what they do and what they decide to do has a near term bearing on their income - calf sales, for example, imply a market where they are in control of the customer relationship. On many of the larger family dairy farms in the US you'll also see cheese making and other elements of the value chain. There are plenty of other US farms of all sizes connecting directly with customers in a variety of ways - although in volume terms they are a drop in the Ocean compared with the large scale growers of corn or raisers of poultry.

It helps that US land prices are low and expansion is a practical proposition.

Dawggone wrote: »

Margin over purchased feed.

Probably the most lethal weapon a salesman can brandish in your office.
I'm certain it was invented by the feed industry....

I had more or less the same post typed a couple of hours ago. A dairy farmer focused on MOC is a meal company's wet dream. I remember 25 years ago in college in the uk and BOCM, Dalgetys and all the other feed companies used to produce these lovely spreadsheets focused on MOC showing all this margin their customers were achieving. Complete bs of course. Wouldn't stand up to any scrutiny. They were fairly on board with it in the colleges though and those students would be very much in the range of having their hands on the tillers at this stage. That article quoted an average production from forage of 6.1l /cow/day. We did 2.5 times that last year over the lactation. They're probably feeding the bones of three tonnes of concentrate per cow for 8000l based on 305 day lactation. We did 7000l off one tonne on the same basis. Not claiming that as delivered lads before I'm attacked just on a like for like.

Greengrass1 wrote: »

Cows onto whole crop here now. Will I get much if a rise in yield? Was undersown with grass. Won't be buffering anything this say next wk hopefully.

Cows as full as beans

Grass well setup there GG. When was that grazed? Big push in growth today. A week of this and we're off. 3 day left in the first rotation, but that's with 6kgs in Parlour, Hulls and a pick of silage

What do they include in the MOPF figure? Only concentrates or conserved / rented forage as well?

kowtow wrote: »

What do they include in the MOPF figure? Only concentrates or conserved / rented forage as well?

Purchased feed kt. Probably incl. any by product used also. Only a kpi according to suppliers. The kpi that deliver are calving interval and kgs of milk solids sold. All the rest are manipulated to convince you that you're not losing your shirt or getting your hole opened by suppliers.

Greengrass1 wrote: »

Grazed 1st wk of march in a wet time. Reseeded with a monoculture back in September. Haven't really got to test it out yet.
27 gr for the last wk here. I'd say we're pretty well about to burst grass wise
1100 on that reseed. 1000 on what the cows are grazing and 1200 on the next pddk

What variety is it?

Greengrass1 wrote: »

Clanrye. A little bit better than Aberchoice on PPI. We'll see what it's made of soon enough

Looks good lad....