Farmer Writes: running a dairy farm has been difficult this year

I have a mantra, which I constantly repeat to the next generation: “You only learn when things go wrong."

I have certainly learnt a lot in the last few months, since running a dairy farm over here has been incredibly difficult.

In a nutshell, all young stock and milking cows on the farm had to be fed winter rations during the drought of June, July and August and since I was reluctant to poach into the conserved winter stocks, I had to buy feed at extortionate prices.

I had to rent 200ac to make silage - expecting to get 1,500t, it yielded 750t. I bought in extra maize, so we now have a ration comprised of 50% maize, 50% grass silage with 10kg of brewers grains added.

The grass silage is very low in protein, which is to be expected since it was very stemmy, heady stuff, so urea levels on our milk quality report have fallen to an all-time low of five.

My feed adviser tells me the lignin (I presume that’s what we used to call fibre), floats in the top of the rumen for 10 days before it sinks down and is utilised or interferes with the diet.

This has caused the butterfat to rise to nearly 5%, so our milk price was very good last month.

However, over the final three months of this year, it has crashed 12p, so it looks as if in January we should be around 30p. The only bright light in the scenario is that presumably it will reduce the cake-to-milk price ratio.

People will reduce cake feeding and hopefully a few will quit milking to get rid of this 6% oversupply we have at the moment.

Dairy farmer numbers

They say the number of dairy farmers in Britain halves every 10 years. I understand at the moment - if I’m correct - we have 7,000. I can’t see that being 3,500 in 10 years' time. Cows obviously don’t increase their yields by that much.

It’s just that herds are getting bigger. During the summer, I acquired 50ac of wheat and clover which were big baled, expecting it to be rocket fuel.

When I put this into the ration in November, it wasn't rocket fuel at all, but had the reverse effect. I acquired it too late. The clover was stemmy.

The wheat was stemmy and the grain had gone past the milky stage, so it's now destined for young stock feed.

Since the grass silage was very low in protein and has caused milk yields to crash, we have increased the protein in the cake and it has helped things marginally, but even after a lifetime in dairy farming, I’m still confused as to where to go next.

Plus side

On the plus side, the cows are coming bulling very actively, making good use of the oestrous strips, which makes life easy.

We did include grass into the ration at the end of November and beginning of December. This was from part of the 40ac we were reseeding for the third time.

The first time it flooded, the second time there was drought, but we were still able to travel to cut bales and then feed directly into the mangers.

We have moved from a three-month drought to three months of incessant rain. It won’t be a white Christmas, but looks like it will be a wet Christmas.