Grass the backbone of Roscommon dairy business

No one was left in any doubt that the Payne family was the rightful winner of the Grass10 Connacht/Ulster regional grassland farmer of the year award for 2017 after the family’s farm walk last Friday. Quite the achievement, given the fact the family only started milking cows in 2011. It is very much a family business managed by Edward (Ed) and his wife Jennifer, as well as Ed’s father Jimmy and mother Dawn. Farm manager Aidan Brosnan helps to run the farm too.

The farm – located in Ballybeg, Tulsk, Co Roscommon – sits on a dry hillside and up to 2011 it was used as an outfarm for the family’s suckler and sheep enterprise.

Ed describes it as a good Roscommon farm with some areas inclined to become ‘‘sticky and tricky’’ at times. He said when they first started dairy farming they were not very knowledgeable about grassland management and were probably over-reliant on bought-in feed as a result.

“We liked to see plenty of lorries coming in tipping loads of grain,” Ed joked. However, with the help of local Teagasc adviser Seamus Nolan, grass has now become an integral part of the business. Seamus said that focusing on better grass management will pay dividends. He explained that for every tonne of grass dry matter utilised on a dairy farm, it results in €181/ha extra profit.

Grassland management

In 2011, the Paynes started milking 140 cows on the farm in Tulsk. Today, they are milking 450 on two farms. There is an 80ha grazing platform in the Tulsk farm of which 58ha is owned and 22ha is leased. They are milking 300 cows on this farm and plan to expand this number to 320 with better grass utilisation. This means the stocking rate is very high on the grazing platform, hitting 3.75LU/ha during the grazing season. However, three leased outfarms with a combined area of 73ha support the farm in Tulsk. Two cuts of silage are taken off these farms and they are also used for young stock. This brings the overall stocking rate down to a more sustainable 2.2LU/ha.

The family also owns a farm outside Ballymoe, Co Galway, having started milking cows for the first time this year. This was the home farm originally when the Paynes had the drystock enterprise. The grazing platform on this farm is made up of 62ha with another 18ha leased and used as a support silage block to the Ballymoe farm. The 150 cows on this farm are milked once a day, mainly for labour reasons. The farm in Ballymoe is not stocked as heavily as Tulsk at 2.5LU/ha.

With the high stocking rate on the Tulsk milking platform, good grassland management is key. Ed believes that the extra cow numbers have helped him to improve grass management on the farm because they have to be constantly looking ahead to manage feed supply. “I think it is easier to manage grass when you’re looking for it rather than looking at it,” said Ed.

Grazing infrastructure, soil fertility, reseeding and grassland measurement are key to maintaining this level of performance. During the conversion to dairying, an internal road network was constructed and large fields were split up into 25 similar sized paddocks.

The whole farm has been reseeded with top-performing varieties from the Department of Agriculture’s recommended list. Soil fertility has been in focus too on the farm. Every paddock is soil-tested annually. Jimmy said that, at the start, paddocks were slow to move up the index but in the last number of years he is seeing an improvement. He said the whole grazing platform was blanket-spread with 10:10:20 in the spring and now they are targeting low-index paddocks with 18:6:12.

The pH on the farm is in good shape with just 7% of the farm displaying a requirement for lime. Stan Lalor from Grassland Agro said that, on average, 75% of Roscommon soils have a lime requirement. He said a balanced pH is crucial; otherwise, it is almost impossible to build soil phosphate levels.

Frequently measuring grass has been an essential tool to management on the farm. In total, 42 grassland measurements were taken throughout 2017. They grew 15.5t DM/ha in total with an average of 10 grazings per paddock in the year. The 10 grazings included the paddocks cut as surplus silage as well as grazing. The main objective of the Teagasc Grass10 campaign was to achieve 10 grazings/paddock/year and utilise over 10t grass DM/ha/year on dairy, beef and sheep farms, according to Michael O’Leary from Pasturebase. Cows spent 272 days at grass last year on the Payne farm, with silage used in the shoulders of the year (early spring and late autumn) to buffer the cow’s diet when growth is slower. Grazing usually starts in February, once cows calve and it ends by mid-November. Ed believes they can improve performance with better management during mid-season and increased soil fertility. “We will aim to keep the rotation length down and take out surplus paddocks where possible from now on,” he explained.

It does not stop at good grassland management, the Paynes are good employers too. They have two full-time employees, Aidan Brosnan from Donegal and Kevin Madden. Aidan was a qualified engineer but decided that office work wasn’t for him.

During some international travel, he worked on large-scale dairy farms and developed a love for the job. He now manages the Tulsk farm and day-to-day decisions are his responsibility while Ed was focused on developing the Ballymoe farm. He said that in the four years he has worked there, there has never been a raised voice. He enjoys the flexibility of the work too. “Once I get the jobs done I can go where I like in the middle of the day, I don’t have to ask permission to do stuff all the time,” he said.

Jennifer said they are always trying to improve people management. “We have proper contracts for our employees and we use timesheets, health and safety is also a priority,” she explained. They get help from students in the springtime and they also have a nightwatch person during calving to take the pressure off the team.

This spring, 10 people worked on the farm; the Paynes said managing a number of employees requires a new skillset. “We try to make it a nice place to work, everyone goes to discussion group meetings. We have improved the domestic facilities on the farm. Automatic cluster removers were added to the parlour to make milking easier and everyday information is put on a whiteboard so everyone knows what is going on,” she explained.

“We prefer to take on people before the hectic spring period so they can get used to the cows and the farm and we always avoid giving too much responsibilities until people are comfortable with a task,” she added. Contractors are also used for all slurry and silage production which means the team can focus on grass and cows.

While trying to find farms to visit abroad during Ed’s Nuffield scholarship, the Paynes noticed that many farms across the US had Facebook pages. “We decided to set up our own page called Hilltop Dairies to show people what we are about, now people come to us looking for work,” Jennifer explained.