Jim Baird shares the message of appreciating our potential

It was good to see harvest getting tidied up around the country, although I hear stories of very disappointing yields locally, which are not surprising considering how little we saw of the sun this summer.

We managed to tidy a fifth cut of silage off around mid-September. It wasn’t a massive crop, but we were just pleased to get it chopped in good order. The silage pits now look a bit more respectable and I am a bit more confident we will have enough for the winter. Time will tell and I am definitely not complacent.

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To have made five cuts of silage and have virtually no effluent to show for it is not bad going in a year like this. We have just had the analysis back from three of the cuts and all look very good on paper. The cows will soon tell us whether that is the case, but there is certainly a lovely sweet smell when it comes out of the feeder and cows are getting wolfed into it.

In early October, fields were just about dry enough for us to dig out the aerating roller. We blitzed all the silage fields and a good number of the grazing fields, and hopefully rolled down and opened up some of the hoof and wheel damage that took place this summer. Unfortunately, some bits of fields have bigger issues than a roller can resolve, so I am going to have to get the digger going shortly and get to work on a few choked drains.

It has also been good to be able to keep a mob of the later calving dry cows outside. They are currently being rotated around the grassiest of the fields and are doing a valuable job tidying off any rough grass before we head into the winter. The farm is probably looking in better shape than it has all year. Considering how challenging this year has been, it does show how fields can recover, particularly on a rotational grazing system.

We are currently right in the thick of calving – that is around 120 cows calved in the first four weeks. There are also around another 100 dry cows in the shed on their transition diet, all due to calve in the next month. Calving is our whole focus and it is about getting a good system and routine going, getting the head down and hopefully, before you know it, the job is about done.

The transition period – the month before calving – is so important in getting cows tuned up for a trouble-free calving, and up and running into their lactation and subsequent breeding. The challenge when you are block-calving is you only really have one chance to get it right. We put a bit of effort and expense into trying to get the ideal fibrous dry cow ration, with the right concentrate and mineral supplementation.

Touch wood, so far it seems to be delivering the desired results. Cows are currently spitting the calves out and the calving jack has been almost completely redundant. At this stage, we have a live calf to show for every cow calved. There have been very few retained cleansings and cows are settling in to milking without any fuss. We are still getting a little bit of milk fever, but less than we have experienced in the past.

That is us just about finished calving black and white and Wagyu calves and soon everything will be calving to the Aberdeen Angus. It looks like we will have around 60 black and white heifer calves, which is nearly what we set out to get. Currently we have only had two black and white bull calves, so this is when we really appreciate sexed semen. The Wagyus will be sold between two to four weeks old which will help take pressure off the calf rearing system.

A huge focus for us at this stage is on giving calves the very best start to life. Key to that is being religious about getting a bottle of colostrum into them as soon as possible after birth. Very few calves will be dry before they taste colostrum, only really those that are born through the night. We have colostrum stored in a fridge in the dairy and as soon as we see a calf born we put a bottle on to heat. It always amazes me how instinct drives new-born calves to suckle. In fact, a good percentage of our calves will have drunk a bottle before they are even on their feet. Especially, I have to say, those born late in the evening when all we want is to get to our bed.

You certainly need the right facilities to calve a lot of cows over a relatively short period of time. We have a big, flexible shed that holds our straw-bedded calving area and also most of our calf rearing pens. Every day we move potential calvers up to the calving area and every milking move newly-calved cows back down to the milking group. It is not an exact science and some cows might spend a week on straw before they calve, while others get the better of us and short-cut that process, dropping a calf in the cubicle shed.

New-born calves have their naval dipped in iodine and are immediately moved down into individual pens. Once they have learned to drink and look hardy enough, they are moved on to automatic feeders. We find these a very labour-efficient way of dealing with a lot of calves. We have 50 calves on each machine, and once they have learned the ropes and settled in, all we need to do is check everyone is healthy and keep the machines topped up with powder. The downside is when something breaks down or the water freezes. Then you have 50 unhappy calves roaring at you.

Block calving is a lot of work, but once the calves are up and have had sufficient colostrum they go on to an automatic calf feeder

Touch wood again, the beauty of block-calving is that our sheds and feeders have been rested for months. We also put a lot of calves through the system quickly, hopefully before any bugs build up.

On top of that we are fairly meticulous in washing calf bottles and buckets for the young calves. I hate tempting fate, but I know from our discussion groups that we suffer very few of the challenges that some other people do in rearing healthy calves.

I mentioned in the last article that we were heading off on holiday and we had a smashing week in Croatia. Beautiful scenery, stunning blue water and warm sunshine. Just the tonic after the summer we have endured.

At the end of September, just before calving got going, I also managed to squeeze in another trip, this time a discussion group study trip to Sweden. We try to do a tour every year, usually UK or Ireland based, but this time we decided to be more adventurous. And what a fascinating trip it was. Sweden is a lovely country. Clean, good roads, surprisingly flat, with lots of lakes and waterways, and trees everywhere. Houses are built among trees and are all of a traditional design and mostly a copper red colour. Farms and farm buildings are all of similar traditional style and farmland is all surrounded by trees.

We visited five really good dairy farms on our trip and one thing that was noticeable was how many women were running the dairy businesses. It seems traditional that men work in the forests and women work the farms. There was a high degree of automation on the farms we visited – robot milkers and automated feeding systems on most farms, and fancy tractors and machinery everywhere.

Grazing cows is compulsory in Sweden, but truth be told it seemed more loafing than grazing, and all farms were working a high-yielding, mostly house-fed system. Stockholm is on a similar latitude to Shetland and during the height of summer they get 24 hours of daylight. The flip side of that is that in the depth of winter they get only around three hours of daylight, and they can expect periods of well below -20 degrees centigrade.

It was a really interesting trip, but one of the key take-homes for us was to make us realise how well placed we are to produce milk in this country. We have better land, a more advantageous climate, a lower cost production system and a more favourable regulatory environment. It is not a bad outcome of the trip to appreciate our own potential.