Host farmers Bruce Thompson and Roy and Trevor Cobbe presented the background of their farms, current performance and future plans. For the walk on Ballyfin farmer Bruce Thompson’s farm, the key points were generating enough winter fodder for the cows and stocking the farm appropriately.

Bruce was milking over 300 cows last year but cut back to 270 cows this year in light of fodder shortages last spring and lower growth rates.

He plans to go back to 300 cows when the farm is generating enough winter feed and summer grass.

Bruce also demonstrated his approach to managing people, with one full-time employee and numerous part-time employees. He uses an app called TimeTree to generate a roster.

He also uses an app called Trello to plan and prioritise the workload. He says that everyone working on the farm has access to the apps so they can see in advance what days they are working and what jobs need to be done.

Partnership

On the Cobbe farm, father and son team Roy and Trevor spoke about how beneficial the farm partnership has been to them since Trevor came home to the farm in 2010. The pair are milking 120 high EBI cows with high output on dry land near Portarlington. Last year the herd delivered 540kg of milk solids per cow from over 1.1t of meal per cow.

Over 200 farmers attended the Grassland walk in Laois last week\ Donal O'Leary

One of the main topics at this walk was about milking facilities. The farm has gone from 40 cows 12 years ago to 120 cows today and over that time money has been put into cubicle sheds, slurry storage and calf housing.

Milking facilities have improved; the original four-unit herringbone has been increased to six units and has been doubled up so there are 12 milking points, but milking is still taking 2.5 hours in the morning with two people.

Teagasc’s Patrick Gowing outlined example costings of a new 20-unit herringbone parlour and compared it to two milking robots. The full cost of the robots was coming in at €360,000 excluding VAT while the full cost of a new 20 unit parlour on a greenfield site was coming in at €327,000 excluding VAT.

Breeding season

On breeding, Bruce Thompson explained his approach to managing the breeding season where he achieves a 93% six-week calving rate in spring. He says he has gone away from using CIDR/PRID-based synchrony programmes due to variable results and costs and instead uses a two-shot prostaglandin (PG) programme.

Heifers are injected with PG 12 or 13 days before breeding starts and given another injection 10 days later. Scratch cards are applied after the second shot and the heifers are served to standing heat. Those who have scratch cards well-worn, indicating they have been bulling for some time are given sexed semen. The rest of the heifers get inseminated with easy-calving Angus bulls.

Second shot

Bruce says that the majority of the heifers come into heat within a few days after getting the second shot. As they are served they are removed from the group and put with a bull. Three weeks later the bulls are removed and scratch cards reapplied and the heifers are watched again for signs of heat.

He said that about 10 or 11 heifers repeated out of 78 this season. Angus bulls pick up any subsequent repeats.

All cows are Metrichecked for signs of uterine infection and treated with a chlorohexidine washout. He has heat monitoring collars on the cows and any cow not yet picked up cycling three days before the start of AI is injected with PG.

He says that about 50% of cows injected will subsequently come into heat. Seven to 10 days later any cow that didn’t respond to the first injection will be injected with PG again. The three-week submission rate is 96%.