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Zoe and Maurice Davey farm 170 all grass acres (some rented) at Northlew near Okehampton Devon. We milk 95 Holsteins averaging around 9,500L. We rear all our calves putting the bulls and beef ones right through to finishing. A small flock of sheep covers a few fields unsuitable for cattle. We make all our own silage and also contract for some of our neighbours. For the last 18 months we have been milking three times a day.
This is an archive of Zoe's articles. For her latest news, see her most recent article.
August 2011
During milking I often think about what I’m going to write in the next blog and somehow it always seems to start with a phrase like ‘it’s been a really difficult month’. Perhaps that’s just farming, or just dairy farming or possibly just dairy farming in this current climate of an unsustainable milk price and rising costs everywhere else. I had better not get started on that subject.
So, now you know what to expect I’m free to say – it’s been a very difficult month! The main problems have been fairly poor grass growth in patchy weather leading to difficulties in feeding the cows. We’ve been tight for grass in the paddocks, (no after-grass yet), so much so that we felt compelled to strip graze some of a 2nd cut silage field that was definitely past its best for that job. The cows did a decent job of eating it off and it has given the paddocks a few extra days to come back to a decent bite.
We have seen an overall loss of condition in the herd with a number of cows becoming cystic. As Maurice says, they have milked on well but skinned themselves doing it. The PD session with the vet this month wasn’t the happy occasion that has been our more recent experience. It would seem that difficulties in management of the paddocks has come home to roost. Really what we should have been doing for the best results after about the 4th grazing would have been to top and harrow each paddock as soon as the cows had left it. That would have meant even grass re-growth of a more consistent quality. Without that topping then there is too much rejection and they are having to spend too much of their time hunting around for palatable grass instead of it being easy for them.
OK, we knew what we should have done, but in real life it’s not so easy. We are a tractor short as the engine blew up and there seems to be little sign of the repair being finished. The only other available tractor is always busy, either on the tanker, the muck spreader, hauling silage or spreading fertiliser. Swapping machines that are old and temperamental is a job best left to Maurice, so having a combination of a free tractor and Maurice available is not something that occurs very often and then the topping and harrowing doesn’t get done – now we are paying the price.
We are addressing the energy issue with 3rd cut silage mixed with blend. We had always said we wouldn’t feed them the 3rd cut, but they seem to like it and the milk’s gone up! We’ll see what happens over the next few weeks.
We’ve had a new experience over the last 2 months, that of a veterinary student here for 3 weeks work experience. Maybe we were just lucky, but from our point of view it worked out very well. Not only was he an extremely nice boy but he worked hard too. Lots of enthusiasm and willingness to learn made him a pleasure to have around. The only down side was the way he ran everywhere made us feel old and tired and he could eat for England despite being as tall and thin as a beanpole. I think we shall offer a student placement again, it’s good to be able to interest, motivate and hopefully educate a young person coming into the industry.
I have acquired a couple of breeding Boer goats this month for meat production. Inevitably one thing leads to another and we have ended up making small bale hay to keep them going through the winter. Actually, the amount of hay we have ended up with will keep them going through several winters! (I daresay the sheep will enjoy some of it). It’s been a close shave with the weather but we finally got the bales in the barn about ½ an hour before the rain. And I thought silage was stressful….
We have done all the 2nd cut silage ourselves with most of it going very well. Towards the end we found a bit of debris in the field while picking up which knocked out a lot of blades. Luckily the weather held and we managed to finish the field. We are seriously considering trying to fit a metal detector to our JF forager. Anyone got any experience here? It would be helpful to hear from someone who has been successful at this. E-mail me at eastkimber@hotmail.co.uk
Over the last few years we have experienced severe problems with iodine deficiency causing dead calves (always heifers), some calves born blind or with eye defects, fertility problems, a high percentage of early abortions (after a positive PD) and a very high percentage of bull calves born. I have now come to the conclusion (although I can’t prove it) that female embryos were more likely to abort which lead to the 80% bull calves over 2-3 years. When the odd heifer calf that did come along died at calving before it took its first breath then it was very hard to see a way forward.
Happily we now know what to do and today we have plenty of un-calved heifers in the pipeline.
What really led me to find some answers to this problem was a condition that I have myself caused by iodine deficiency. I’ve had treatment for this for over 20 years and have been on a stable dose of medication for at least 20 years. Then we went onto a borehole.
I gradually became very ill and my level of treatment had to increase by 300%!! I was sure that there had to be a link somewhere and the only thing in common between me and the cows was water.
Cows can apparently be swimming in Iodine and it won’t be of any use to them unless they have enough Selenium. It is the Selenium that allows the cow to utilise the Iodine. Our water is very high in Manganese which locks up Selenium and so prevents the cows from being able to access Iodine so leading eventually to all these problems.
Although we started by drenching the dry cows on a monthly basis with Wooden Tongue Drench we now use boluses, starting with bulling heifers, then again about a month before calving and all cows at drying off. In addition we have Selplex added to the dairy cake.
The results from doing this have been startling. Cows that we couldn’t get in calf and had served over and over again all held to the next service after being bolused. Early abortions are down to normal levels. Calves born to conventional semen show a normal proportion of heifers. No more calves dying at birth. Better conception rates.
Of course we all know that every farm is different but it may help some of you to hear of our experiences. It wasn’t easy to find out the causes or solutions and took us several years. We have talked to vets, nutritionists, mineral specialists, water analysts, other farmers, searched the internet and no single person could give us the whole picture. We had to be persistent and trust the ‘gut feeling’ about our cows.
July 2011
I’ve been talking about making good our cow tracks for some months now and planning it even longer. Every time we think we can have a go at it the plan gets ‘rearranged’ by outside influences. This current attempt seems to be heading the same way! We hired a 5½ tonne swing shovel for a week with the list of jobs getting longer by the day. The floor of the new shed got dug out and levelled, drains for the calf hutches dug and back filled, other small jobs around the place and then it was the turn of the cow tracks. Our plan is to dig a trench up the middle of the track using the 2 foot bucket, put the spoil on either side to make tractor access then fill the trench with wood chip. We know it’s not ideal to have a cow track that you also drive on but with our small number of cows we thought we could get away with it. Even if they walk in single file it won’t take too long to get them in from the field.
The initial problem with this seemingly simple plan was the total absence of the 2 foot bucket with the hired machine. Eventually after a day or so we got it here on farm and that’s when the trouble really started. Try as we might we just couldn’t attach the bucket. It was so tight that all efforts with levers, sledgehammers and cunning driving just couldn’t make the spring catch latch into place. We spent all morning on this before finally we phoned for help. ‘Be there in an hour…’ I bet you’ve all heard that before somewhere – we were still waiting some hours later. Eventually though help did come and gratifyingly he struggled just as much as we had. Given that it was his machine he could decide just how much force to use and in the end the bucket was fixed on. I don’t think we shall be taking it off again in a hurry!! We were nearly a whole day behind by this time but made a start. By the evening the trench had been dug, we had disagreed about how it needed to be and then about half of it had been rearranged. While Maurice was doing that I went back and forth with the loader bringing in the wood chip. That bit was OK, getting out and spreading it was more taxing. My loader tipping skills quickly improved when faced with shovelling the stuff this way and that.
The cows have definitely appreciated walking on it and it IS an improvement on what was there before, but the 2 foot trench isn’t really wide enough (I bet you all knew that anyway!). It will need thinking about and revisiting with plan B in due course.
I mentioned last month that we were concerned about milk proteins, well things haven’t been improving much. We are also concerned about newly calved cows losing too much weight. A new parlour cake has been formulated for us and we are waiting to see if that improves things, but we also had a visit from Matt Rance of MVF Forage Solutions and he thought our problems stemmed from a different source. He calculated the amount of forage the cows were getting from buffer fed silage and grazed grass using the plate meter and an estimate for the amount of rejection in the paddocks and it would seem that the Dry Matter Intake is just too low – could well be around 9kg per cow instead of about the 12kg that we are aiming for. A more difficult question to answer is what to do about it whilst still maximising grazing!
Matt estimates that when a cow pees on the grass it is equivalent to putting about 800 units of N per acre on that one little spot. The grass takes up the Nitrogen and becomes bitter and unpalatable hence the rejection. It is true that if you look at the bits the cows don’t eat it isn’t all cow pats. In fact they will generally graze right up to the edge of a patch of muck and leave the dark green areas of high N concentration. This situation has been made worse by the very dry conditions not diluting or washing away all this excess. According to all our ‘experts’ this year has been a particularly difficult one to cope with in terms of any sort of grazing and has led to the patchy fields we are seeing now.
It hasn’t all been the weather…. Over the last few weeks it has been manically busy and I either haven’t had the time or have been too exhausted or it’s been too wet to get out with the plate meter. It takes about an hour to walk around all the paddocks and do a good job – somehow I just haven’t fitted it in. Peter Isaac tells us that because of the lack of monitoring we have now let the grass get away from us. So – now we have a new strategy. More topping directly the cows leave a paddock. We have been doing it alternate grazings now it will be every time. Following topping we need to harrow and break the muck up a bit. We don’t have a set of harrows so the unconventional solution is to get out there with the silage rake and scratch it around that way. I can feel plenty of pressure washing coming on! Another suggestion made to us is to top the field just before the cows go into it. We have tried one paddock so far, but it is hard to really decide if they ate more that way or not, especially as I forgot to put the hand-piece on so they broke through the fence to the next paddock anyway.
In May we experienced 3 cases of milk fever in older cows, not something that we would normally see more than once or twice a year. We have known for a long time that the way we handle the dry cows is pretty rubbish, but given the constraints of land and buildings we hadn’t really seen how to improve things despite throwing lots of options back and forward. Pete Isaac took us to task about that too with the result that tomorrow all the dry cows are coming in from the fields and staying in cubicles. There is a stack of round bale silage from last year so they are going to be eating that plus a special dry cow ration. There are some vulnerable cows to calve in the next couple of months so it will be interesting to see what happens.
Calf hutches are wonderful, we are so pleased with them. I have been weaning calves at about 7 weeks once they are eating 1kg of cake a day for 3 consecutive days. I think for some calves I could start weighing cake a bit earlier than I have been. Certainly the ones I am weaning at the moment are eating 2kg of cake a day at just over 7 weeks and are looking really well. They are easy to feed, bed up and pressure wash, keeping their outside yard clean is more difficult. A fiddly job to climb in and out helped by an enthusiastic calf who is sure you will feed it if it keeps on long enough! Not my favourite part of the job, but a small price to pay for healthy stock.
June 2011
Feeding cows at grass is never an easy job. There are so many variables to contend with – not surprising that many herds opt to keep their cows in all the year round and have that consistency of management.
Still, we are not in that position and so are facing the problems that are inherent with grazing. It’s been something of a turbulent month and I feel a bit battered by what seems to have been a rough ride.
At the end of last month we had just started silaging and that went fine. We did about 15 acres altogether which included one field of silage grass that was plenty far enough on. At the end of last season our mower died (not for the first time) and it was still with the engineer who was going to repair it, so for this early silage he lent us another one. As this was a rather smart machine we decided against using it to top the cow paddocks (we don’t have a separate topper) and so the cows went around again before the fields could be topped. That didn’t prove to be a happy decision. We have got something of a problem with docks and they really should have had their heads cut off as well as the rejected grass cut back. The very dry rather cold weather slowed down the grass growth and the muck from the cows just wasn’t getting washed back in.
Before the after grass was ready we were struggling for grazing. Fortunately we have a lot of 2nd cut silage from last year and the cows have been eating plenty of that. For some reason that I can’t remember we weren’t too timely either with the second application of fertiliser on some of the grazing paddocks so all things combined with one result – STRESS!!
We had after grass coming though, so with some pleasure we let the cows into the first of those paddocks. Ever seen ½ tonne black and white locusts? They wiped what should have been 24 hours of grass in about 4. Suddenly what grazing there was in front of them didn’t seem quite as much any more.
Milk went up to 32.5 litres and butterfat went down! No interest now in silage, those cows ate that after grass like they had never been fed. The butterfat was a bit of a worry, down to 3.6%, but we didn’t really see what we could do about it.
Once they had marched through the six paddocks that we had silaged they were back into the original paddocks. Now we had our old mower back and started topping the fields after each grazing. It certainly helped to spread the muck, reduce the shading from docks and encourage re-growth, but they look very bare.
It was at this point about a week before the end of May that a bit of panic set in. For years we had strip grazed cows on what seemed to us to be a good sward of grass. Now we were being told that grass at that height was no good and we needed to graze it much shorter. It felt as though we were trying to feed these cows on lawn mowings and we couldn’t see where the next mouthful was coming from. It seemed as though we were chasing the grass as quickly as it was growing and we had reached the point were we thought we would have to bring the cows in to give the paddocks time to recover.
Peter was again on the end of the phone, and at the end of a long day took the time to walk the fields with us and explain that actually we were doing alright. That there was more grass there than we thought. OK, it was tighter than we would like, but actually we did have the field that we silaged first time around that we could fall back on to graze if necessary, but at the moment we shouldn’t worry, the cows were fine.
It is true that the cows weren’t telling us that they were unhappy. Milk was steady at about 31 litres, butterfat had crept up a little to 3.8% they weren’t shouting at the gate and were eating up the buffer feed that was put out for them late at night.
I suppose it is all about expectations. Making better use of grazed grass could be interpreted as getting ALL the milk from grass and then feeding silage seems to defeat the object. Really though we ARE using the grass better. When we top the paddocks there is very little grass coming off, less than topping after strip grazing. If we are truthful we are keeping about 10 more cows on the same amount of land than last year with a growing season that is proving challenging to say the least so we shouldn’t be too surprised to get short of grass from time to time. Silage is considerably cheaper than concentrate, and we have got plenty of it so from that point of view we are in a good position.
Getting your head around what a ‘good’ field of grazing grass now looks like is more difficult. Apparently it takes twice as long to break a habit as it does to establish it in the first place. By that reckoning we should be comfortable with paddock grazing in about 80 years time!!!
The last month hasn’t entirely been a struggle. For the first time since 1974 we had a contractor bring in our first cut silage. It wasn’t something that was planned, he drove his forager into our yard on the Saturday by mistake looking for somewhere else and then we got talking – as you do. Monday the team arrived and by the evening the whole lot was in and sheeted down. A good feeling. What is even better is that now, with the benefit of hindsight, we would still have made the same decision.
Another nice thing was the latest visit from the Holstein Classifier. It was pleasing to have three more excellent cows and five more to add to a satisfying number of Very Goods.
Finally – but I think my favourite thing of the month – our calf hutches arrived. We first started looking at them a year ago at the Cornwall Show. Many discussions with farmers, an awful lot of site work and agonising over money has finally resulted in stage one of our new improved calf rearing facilities. We are so pleased with them, and more importantly so are the calves. A whole two weeks with nothing treated for pneumonia. It’s early days but looking good.
That’s me done for this month. Off to another round of platemetering – oh joy. Now with all the paddocks in the rotation it takes nearly an hour to walk around. Maurice tells me it’s good for the figure!
May 2011
We knew it would be a learning curve and not surprisingly that is what adapting to this grazing regime is turning out to be.
The cows went out on April 7th which has got to be our earliest turn-out ever. Even so there were plenty of other cows in fields before we decided to open the shed door. All of our land faces North and is fairly wet in places so we are never very early to start grazing in the Spring, but this exceptional warm and sunny weather has dried out the ground and caused an explosion in grass growth. Looking at our first grazing wedge it seems that we should have let them out a week earlier!
Most of our time has been spent trying to get the infrastructure of this paddock system put in place, not altogether successfully. There have been delays in getting some of the electric fencing equipment so we have no electric bungee cord for making gates (interesting!) and a shortage of water troughs, again awaiting delivery. The wire for putting up temporary paddock divisions arrived about an hour before we wanted to turn the cows out so that was a bit of a rush.
We had booked a digger to renovate the cow tracks and the previous month ordered wood chip. That didn’t pan out as when the time arrived the wood chip people said they were using diseased larch and couldn’t sell it to us. Another plan scuppered!
The cows were of course very pleased to be out and ran straight through the wire on the first day. Second day the cows were fine but the bulling heifers managed to break out and tear the whole lot to pieces even the ‘permanent’ high tensile wire fencing. Stakes pulled out, wire trailing and sparking everywhere and cows in every place they shouldn’t be. Lovely. It took us until 9.30 at night to sort that lot out, quick bite to eat and then on again milking. Some days you do wonder why you farm at all.
While the cows were grazing the first two paddocks the man arrived with the mole plough to lay the pipes for the extra water troughs. That all went smoothly but when the cows had to cross the line of the pipe to get to the third paddock we did have problems. They refused! Another couple of days of cows in the wrong paddocks and general mayhem.
In-between times we have to decide whether or not to put out silage. Maurice has been putting it out overnight to buffer them, but it is difficult to fit it all in with the milk lorry arriving just at the end of night time milking on alternate days. One day we decided to do silage a bit earlier to help ourselves. The cows heard the loader and 90% of the herd left the field and lined up along the trough. So much for grazing that paddock down! It seems very difficult to get it right.
Pete Isaac responded to our call for help and arrived yesterday with soothing words and a walk around with the plate meter. The last paddock to be grazed was down to 1750 or there abouts and we were pleased with that.
As you can see from that week’s grazing wedge the grass is racing ahead of us and we shall have to take a whole load of paddocks out of the grazing rotation and cut them for silage. (Probably means taking down some of that high tensile fencing that we have just put up….)
Mid April and it is growing at 138kg dry matter/hectare/day. That sounds a lot to me. We have decided to take six paddocks out or else we shall never catch up and be grazing at the right stage – so our new plan now looks like this:
Although it does now feel a bit more manageable from the grazing point of view at the moment, it feels like we are storing up trouble for later. What is going to happen when we are busy silaging grazing ground and have run out of grass in the remaining paddocks!
28 April 2011
It’s been quite a month one way and another and we found out what happens when the grass gets short…. The first grazing around the paddocks went OK after our rocky start and the milk went up from 31 to 32 litres/cow/day. We eased back on the buffer feed as they seemed very content. That all went wrong when we started going around the paddocks for the second time. Milk dropped rather drastically when we hit the second paddock and they were prowling around the yards looking for food. Maurice started the loader to mix silage and there was a complete riot. They knew what the loader meant! It took both of us to part the cows sufficiently in order to get the silage into the bunker. We found that very stressful and wondered what on earth we were doing, however when we went out in the morning they were laid out in the paddock with only a quarter of the silage eaten. So much for hungry cows!
Since then they have been fine, milk’s back up and our only angst was whether or not to cut the paddocks that had got ahead of the cows. After our previous experience we had got very jumpy about running out of grass. After much discussion and adding up likely grazing days we decided to cut six out of the original 18 paddocks. So, here we are, busy silaging and hoping to get it all in before the rain arrives tomorrow.
I should just comment before I go about the level of professional support we have received from Pete Isaac of Mole Valley Farmers. We have been very impressed and appreciative of the fact that he has always been on the end of the phone or on the farm doing all he can to help us adapt to this new (for us) regime and get the best out of the cows. Thanks Pete.
PS. – the bungee arrived to make gates, it’s great stuff!
April 2011
I suspect that in common with many people we have been growing grass in the same way for years. Not really stopped to think too much about it. It was there, the cows ate it, we made silage of reasonable quality and everything seemed fine. In the last 18 months everything we thought we knew about growing grass is out of the window and we are having to learn all over again.
It’s been a rewarding, difficult and stressful journey and we know we are only part of the way there.
Over the last couple of years following help and advice from Matt Rance and Simon Mathews of Mole Valley Farmers we had moved over to specifics for fertiliser and totally changed our approach and policy there. We bought an aerator and muggings spent many boring hours crawling over all the fields while my better half turned up to see how it was going and commented that maybe I should drive even SLOWER! He left the field quicker than he arrived…. The result of all our hard work was to grow an amazing crop of grass last year. Many people around us were struggling for quantity on first cut and we were about 30% up. So, we had already challenged some deep held practices regarding the use of Nitrogen and had gone from spreading fertiliser 5 times a year to 2 times. Perhaps all this change made us good candidates for Peter Isaac’s plans……
Peter came to see us towards the end of the winter to ask if we would consider changing our grazing strategy in order to make better use of our grass. Peter’s plan was to move over to small paddocks which last 24 hours each, move the cows on each day and manage the quantity of grass by using a plate meter to work out the cover in a field. We know that this is nothing new and many people successfully work this system but our understanding was that it didn’t work very well with high yielding Holstein cows as they are not the world’s best grazers plus we milk three times a day. We were pretty sceptical about it being a success for us.
Peter put forward a convincing argument and we chewed it over (so to speak!) for a couple of weeks before deciding that it was all too much to face. It meant setting up paddocks, putting in more cow tracks, sorting out extra water troughs plus running around with the plate meter. We were worried about hungry cows shouting at the gate – couldn’t face that!! They are used to out of parlour feeding plus buffer silage. Then there was the problem of getting to grips with a whole new concept in managing grazing which we felt hazy about to say the least. We made up our minds to turn him down.
That isn’t quite what happened. Matt and Peter between them managed to cover all of our arguments against the change, came up with some help to set up the paddocks and suddenly we find ourselves buying fencing stakes, water troughs and planning to extend cow tracks. (How did that happen?)
31 March 2011
Things have moved on suddenly this week. There have been problems with the plate meter. Ours reads very differently to Peter’s and he has had to take it away to calibrate it. Even so there is still too big a difference and it needs more attention. I am not terribly impressed with that, I would expect to be able to take it out of the box and for it to be accurate. Hey ho. Earlier in the week we put in most of the high tensile fencing for dividing up the fields. We eventually decided to only fence tracks and do the main division of the fields and then do the rest this year with temporary fencing to see how it pans out.
Grass is growing and we feel a new urgency about fixing up the cow tracks and installing water troughs – another busy month ahead!!
7 March 2011
Today I marched around by myself with the plate meter. It’s the first time I have used one and I was a little disturbed by it making funny beeping noises every so often. After three paddocks I figured out that it was letting me know that I had done the 30 clicks required to assess the grass and I could stop now! Peter called around with his meter but our results are very different so we need to do some calibration I guess. Another couple of weeks and we shall see our first grazing wedge. Something to look forward to! Apparently we are going to turn cows out soon – I don’t think so!!
28 February 2011
Today Peter and I have walked around with his plate meter to assess the cover of grass before we start. I have instructions to do the whole thing again in a week’s time. I can see whose job that is going to be (and it won’t be Maurice). I feel a little more confident about where this is all headed. Up to now I have felt very much out of control, anxious and unsure about what we actually do each day when the cows go out. Out of the fog there is a glimmer of light showing how this is going to work.
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