Farmer Writes: a bull worth organising the collection of semen from

Monday 27 November 2023 was a momentous day for the Brinkworth Herd at Hill End Farm. We at last had the confidence to organise the collection of semen from one of our bulls, for AI with UK Sires.

Brinkworth Buster VG87 is from six generations of very good (VG) and excellent (EX), three generations EX and his mother did 5.28% butterfat and 3.58% protein in her third lactation.

At one point, the herd contained mother, sister, son and granddaughter, an example of longevity within the family, with plus production indices all the way through.

Easy born calves

His first crop of calves were easy born without assistance and up and sucking readily in spite of being autumn-born, when calves are often lethargic.

The biggest plus for Brinkworth Buster is that he’s 82% British Friesian, so offspring should be purebred. He is for sale with semen available from UK Sires.

Over 50 years ago, the other end of the table, before she was even Mrs Collingborn, took over the breeding of the herd and very cleverly crossed backwards and forwards between Frieisian and Holstein, producing a herd with longevity, milk quality, milk from forage and yields approaching Holsteins.

The big job going into the autumn was concreting the cubicle beds. When we constructed the cubicles five years ago, for the sake of economy we put in concrete heelstones with limestone beds.

Over the years the limestone had worn hollow, leaving damp spots, which Stevie, our farm worker, was convinced was contributing to a mastitis problem.

After we’d concreted, raising the beds by over an inch, which made the metal work slightly lower, the cows started climbing through and getting stuck.

We overcame this by raising all the metal work the required amount.

Doing the splits

The next problem is where we have excavated the limestone into the central passage and scraped up with the bucket - it had made the passageway smooth and we were getting cows doing the splits.

This we overcame by calling in the French grooving firm Vermont, which operates throughout Europe, Britain and Ireland, and did an excellent job with deep horizontal grooves.

But now, in spite of using abundant straw, we are going to have to put mattresses on the concrete. Suggestions welcome.

In spite all this, we were still getting some E coli mastitis. By chance, I inspected the IBC containers where the plate cooler water and washing water is collected from the parlour and used to wash down the parlour with a volume wash pump.

Someone had allowed milk to go in there, contaminating the water with which we were washing the clusters down during milking, with the result that we were washing down the clusters with a nice solution of sour milk.

Hopefully, my clean-up will have caused the problem to cease.