Farmer Writes: improving roadways and counting the pennies

The last couple of weeks have been particularly tough on the farm with storms, hurricanes and general wet weather causing ground conditions to deteriorate further and playing havoc with our farm roadways. We hired a digger this week to help with the tidy-up of fallen trees and branches after the storm and to try to clean up some of the roadways at the same time.

We cleaned the worst of the muck off the cow roads and replaced it with a couple of loads of quarry dust. This has helped to speed up cow flow to and from the milking parlour a lot over the last few days. If the wet weather continues, we may have to repeat this exercise before the end of the year but so be it.

The cost wasn’t excessive and anything is better than sitting for hours on a quadbike watching cows doing their autumn shuffle, hobbling along and splashing mud up on to their udders.

We will start once-a-day milking this weekend, which will decrease the mileage on both the roadways and the cows and hopefully this will help us to get to dry-off with legs and feet in good shape. In the long term, we need to widen a few of the older roadways on the farm and improve the camber in some areas to keep them working as well as possible into the future.

It might be a good time to walk all the farm roads with a notebook or map in hand and take note of the areas that need the most improvement. If a plan can be put in place for improvements that are necessary over the next few weeks or months, even thinking about the plan might help to alleviate some of the stress and boredom from lost hours staring at the slow-moving backsides of heavily pregnant bovines.

We managed to keep cows grazing right through the wet weather but we should probably have housed them for one or two grazings. We did a bit of damage in one field but with a rest from now until next March, it should have enough time to recover fully for spring grazing.

Grass has continued to grow exceptionally well through the month of October with regrowths, in particular, coming back very quickly with the mild weather and despite all of the rain. Cows are also milking very well with 1.4kg of milk solids going into the tank every day from 4kg of meal now in the bad weather.

We grazed 2ha per day of our 100ha milking platform through October and will move to 1ha per day now with silage going in next week to make up the difference.

Milk price

The milk price in this region is the other bone of contention this week with Glanbia holding its milk price while other co-ops gave an extra cent for September milk. We won’t have a bonus to hide behind this month in the milk league, so we will be right at the bottom of the pile as the worst milk buyers in the country.

It’s time to ask some serious questions of management if the biggest and boldest milk processor in the country can afford to give €20/t back on all feed purchases but can’t afford to pay a competitive price for its milk. Delivering a decent milk price needs to move up the priority list very quickly.