Dairy management: countdown to Christmas

Christmas is the one time of the year where everyone takes holidays, everyone apart from farmers and those working in front-line services that is.

Even though farmers need to work over Christmas, the workload is usually lessened by only doing routine jobs.

Getting away with only doing routine jobs takes planning and the time to plan this is now. For me, routine jobs means only doing the essential tasks such as feeding, bedding and milking, if applicable.

Decisions around whether or not to milk through Christmas should have been made before now, but either way the decision needs to be made this week

Decisions around whether or not to milk through Christmas should have been made before now, but either way the decision needs to be made this week.

I was chatting to a farmer last week who has decided to milk the late calving and empty cows on and dry them off as they come within eight weeks of calving or until they are sold.

Extra work

It’s a lot of extra work, not only during Christmas, but also during January when others are relaxing and preparing for the busy spring workload.

It can help to generate cash and it does help to retain cows in the system, but whether or not it’s the right thing to do probably depends on other factors.

If cows are to be dried off, do it early this week. That way, there is time to put cows on low intakes for a few days after drying off and all animals will be on their normal winter diet for Christmas.

Order in essentials such as meal and diesel this week so they will be delivered in time for Christmas. Give suppliers plenty of notice of when you need to take deliveries, as lead-in times are usually longer at this time of year.

Fix any equipment that is giving trouble or likely to give trouble. Things like automatic scrapers have a habit of breaking down at the most awkward of times. If spare parts are required, then get them in stock.

Plumbing

It would be useful to have spare plumbing parts too in the event of a hard frost over Christmas. Have supplies of salt on hand for gritting yards and roadways.

Where there is more than one person working on the farm, a Christmas roster should have been circulated well before now.

Make sure people working on the farm have adequate time off and that time off is distributed fairly among all the employees.

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