Nine speakers, six hours, four cows and one demonstration milking parlour. These are the numbers from the Skills Hub at Dairy Day. This event was all about demonstrating the skills necessary to be a dairy farmer in today’s world.

The following is a summary of the main points

Padraig O’Connor

Padraig O’Connor from Teagasc demonstrated best milking practice on a four-unit milking parlour. He said most farmers use an incorrect technique resulting in repetitive strain injury causing chronic back and shoulder pain in later life.

Using a poor technique is also slower, leading to increased idle time. The key point is to switch the hands holding and attaching clusters depending on which side of the parlour you are working on. The hand holding the cluster should always be the hand closest to the front of the parlour. Attach clusters in a circular motion, starting at the teat nearest the kerb.

Nollaig Heffernan

Nollaig Heffernan spoke about the skills needed to successfully manage employees. She said she is fed up of hearing stories about a lack of good people available to work on dairy farms.

“Good people are scarce across all sectors and not just in farming. The problem with dairy farming is that the scarcity of people is combined with poor people management practices, meaning it is harder to attract people into the sector,” Nollaig said. She said farmers need to improve the way they manage employees if there is any hope of changing the current situation.

“For example, you must honour all agreements made with the employee. If you said the hours are from 7am to 5pm, you better be sure that the person can go home at 5pm. Otherwise, you are showing a complete lack of respect for their time,” Nollaig said.

Brian Ronayne

Brian Ronayne from east Cork spoke about his experiences of growing his herd from 48 cows in 2010 to milking 400 cows in a partnership this year.

He initially planned to milk 200 cows, but when opportunities came to take on more land he went for it. Roadways had to be widened and paddocks made bigger to accommodate the extra cows. His ideal paddock size is now 15 acres, so he has had to make gaps in hedges to join fields together.

Bertie Troy from Grasstec said that the most common mistake he encounters in farmyard design is farmers not knowing the levels. He said in most cases it is significantly cheaper to dig into a hill than it is to buy stone to raise a site.

Brian and Anne Marie Doheny

Brian and Anne Marie Doheny from Kilkenny spoke about their approach to cashflow management with Peter Young. Anne Marie said she uses a backwards budget to calculate how much they need to make from the farm. The starting point for this is drawings and then bank repayments, followed by fixed and variable costs. She said doing the budget for the year gives them peace of mind and filling in the monthly cashflow gives them total visibility of their business.

Noel Byrne

Noel Byrne from Moorepark body condition scored the four cows in the pen. He said cows should be at BCS 2.9 at breeding time. “But waiting to BCS the day before breeding starts is a waste of time as you can’t do anything to change it then. I’d say you should score the herd a month or six weeks before breeding and put any cows with a score of 2.75 or below on once-a-day milking until they are bred,” Noel said. When asked why he wouldn’t feed the thin ones extra meal, he said cows will be more likely to use the meal for milk at that stage as opposed to putting on fat.

Micheal O’Leary

Micheal O’Leary gave a demonstration on how to use the Pasturebase Ireland website for managing grass. He said all existing Agrinet customers will be migrating to Pasturebase over the coming weeks. He demonstrated cutting and weighing grass and inputting a cover into Pasturebase. “We have lots of farmers that put the figures into Pasturebase but only a handful actually make decisions based on the information they get back. The biggest mistakes are made in the summer as farmers are grazing covers that are too high. Any cover over 1,600kg/ha should be skipped and made for bales.”

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Full coverage: Dairy Day 2017