Eamonn Duggan is milking 144 cows and rearing 90 replacement heifers at his fragmented farm near Durrow, Co Laois. Eamonn is one of the speakers at the 2020 Irish Grassland Association dairy conference being held in Charleville, Co Cork, on 8 January 2020. With 36ha in the milking platform, Eamonn’s home farm is highly stocked at four cows per hectare. Two outfarms totalling 34ha provide winter feed for the dairy herd and grazing and wintering ground for the youngstock enterprise. Eamonn considers one outblock of 20ha to be a continuation of the milking platform, even though it’s located a few miles from the parlour.
Eamonn Duggan is milking 144 cows and rearing 90 replacement heifers at his fragmented farm near Durrow, Co Laois. Eamonn is one of the speakers at the 2020 Irish Grassland Association dairy conference being held in Charleville, Co Cork, on 8 January 2020. With 36ha in the milking platform, Eamonn’s home farm is highly stocked at four cows per hectare. Two outfarms totalling 34ha provide winter feed for the dairy herd and grazing and wintering ground for the youngstock enterprise. Eamonn considers one outblock of 20ha to be a continuation of the milking platform, even though it’s located a few miles from the parlour.
The calving shed on Eamonn Duggan's farm.
“We take a light cut of silage off all this land in early May at a cover of between 1,800kg/ha and 2,000kg/ha. It’s really high-quality stuff and we feed this back to the milking cows at the shoulders of the year or if we get a dry spell during the summer. Then we close it up for a big cut of dry cow silage in July and then another cut of quality silage in September. We need 180 good-quality bales for the spring. Then the heifers graze it during November before being housed in December,” Eamonn says.
About 30 heifers are kept as replacements for the dairy herd, with around 60 heifers sold in-calf every September. Producing 90 heifer calves from 144 cows is a fair achievement. Sexed semen is used on heifers and the first 30 heifers to calve are the ones Eamonn keeps for himself, regardless of EBI. So nearly all the in-calf heifers end up having heifer calves.
An old abreast milking parlour has been converted to a calf shed for the baby calves.
Empty rates are usually around 10%, so if 14 cows are empty, this leaves 130 cows in calf. Calving rate is consistently at 90% in six weeks and all the cows to calve in the first six weeks are in-calf to dairy AI. This means that around 117 cows are due to calve to dairy. If half of these have heifer calves, this leaves 58 heifer calves. Between these calves and the calves produced by the heifers there will be close to 90 calves on the ground, even accounting for some losses.
System
The calf-rearing system on the Duggan farm is simple but effective. Cows calve in a big straw-bedded shed capable of holding 40 cows. After the first six weeks of calving, this shed is split in two, with the remaining cows to calve in one half and calves in the other half. Baby calves are moved from the calving shed to older sheds on the farm (an old milking parlour and stables) where they are kept in small groups for a few days. The heifer calves are then grouped in larger groups of 20.
When there are two groups of 20, both groups will be moved to an outfarm and fed once a day in a large round-roofed shed. This shed is used to store straw at this time of year.
A straw-bedded shed adjacent to this shed houses dry cows and heifers so a lot of the straw will be used by early spring. Calves are fed using a 50-teat trailed feeder which Eamonn tows to the yard behind the tractor. As the calves are fed once a day, they are fed at around 11am and whoever is feeding the calves will push in silage with the tractor while the calves are drinking.
Dairy farmer Eamonn Duggan and his three boys Will, Ned and Geoffrey.
“The calf feeder is parked in the yard; we unhitch it, open the gates to the calf shed and the calves run out. We then go off and do the other jobs and when we come back the calves are finished drinking and are starting to wander back into the shed so it’s not a big job to lock them back in. This shed is bedded with straw and we change the straw regularly and use the old straw to bed the dry cows in the shed next to the calf shed,” Eamonn says.
The next 30 heifer calves are reared on their own on the home farm before joining the calves on the outfarm after weaning. The last calves to be born are reared on the home farm all summer getting access to milk, meal and good grass. All calves have access to a field and a shed. Bull calves are sold at a few weeks of age, either privately or in the mart. Eamonn says he has capacity to carry bull calves for longer if he needs to.
The Irish Grassland Association dairy conference is on 8 January in Charleville, Co Cork. Early booking is advised at www.irishgrassland.ie
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