Meal
With almost all herds now fully housed and milking from indoors, a few farmers have been asking how much meal they should be feeding for the next few weeks.
The dynamics are unusual in that meal is costing about €300/t, while the milk price at this time of year with a higher fat and protein percentage is worth about 66c/l on average.
Some farmers are getting more than this and some farmers are getting less than, depending on milk quality results.
The easy narrative is that every €1 spent on meal will return over €2 in milk sales, but that’s not quite how it works, as it all depends on the response to concentrate.
What the response actually is depends on a number of factors, including silage quality, genetics and stage of lactation.
At farm level it is never 1:1 and most likely somewhere between 1:0.5 and 1:0.75 in terms of the response in kg of milk to feeding 1kg of meal.
The other thing to note is that it is not linear, so the response to the fifth or sixth kilo of meal is not the same as the response to the second or third kilo. I see a lot of farmers are feeding 5kg and 6kg of meal when the herd is milking 13 or 14l of milk per cow per day.
I imagine that there is at least 2kg or 3kg of that meal just making already fat cows fatter with no economic return.
I think feeding milking cows 2kg to 4kg of meal over the next few weeks is more appropriate given where milk and meal prices are at. Feeding any more is a waste of money, and farmers would be far better off to focus on making high quality silage to feed during this period.
Lactose
As milk yield drops, so too does lactose levels and low lactose affects the processability of the milk. Most of the co-ops have set a limit of 4.3% for lactose, below which penalties will apply.
Tirlán have increased their threshold for lactose to 4.35% from November, which could have implications for those expecting to receive the seasonality bonus this winter.
The percentage of tests in the month less than 4.35% lactose will reduce the seasonality bonus by that amount, so it is something that needs to be monitored carefully.
The best way to keep lactose up is by drying off low yielding cows, especially those milking less than 9l per cow per day.
Costs
At Dairy Day last week the key message from the session on costs was to target a cost per kilo of milk solids of less than €3 before own labour, principle repayments and tax.
It’s a tall ask considering where costs have been for the last few years, but its good to have a target.
Dairy farmer Mike Bermingham and Teagasc’s Laurence Shalloo presented Mike’s budget for 2025.
The conversation on costs has moved on from cent per litre as everyone is paid on milk solids, and it’s much easier to work out milk receipts when the focus is on milk solids rather than c/l and then working out how much above base price the farm will get. The challenge for Mike is to deliver on that €3.37/kg MS budget.
This is a subscriber-only article
SHARING OPTIONS: