This month Alistair Logan considers the new service from his vets that has made a big difference to calf performance, and attracting the next generation into the industry.
We’re now into the last weeks of 2023, winter’s grip is taking over the country, the clocks have gone back, what leaves are left on the trees are yellow, red and orange and will fall with the next gusts of wind.
Here in West Central Scotland, we’ve missed the usual rain and have had one of the driest and most settled periods of autumn weather for some considerable time. While many other areas of the country have struggled with the first storms of the winter, with severe flooding in many areas, trees uprooted and homes damaged, we have missed out – we’re not jealous!
Almost all our dairy cattle are housed year-round, the in-calf heifers, however, are turned out after they are confirmed in calf. They’ll now have been housed for six weeks with a small batch of maiden heifers that we turned out in the spring, which were the last group to be brought back in.
At the time when we had an abundance of grass in the spring and a few less in-calf heifers, we turned some younger ones out. Was it a good idea? I’m not convinced.
Yes, it would have been cheaper to rear them and they were on good grass all summer but I reckon they’ll be a couple of months behind their herd mates growth wise, that weren’t out at all.
These heifers that have been housed full time have never looked back and we’re now looking at the pen of 11 to 12 month old heifers that are big enough to start AI’ing, for calving at well under two years.
I’d say these are the first batches of heifers with such good growth rates – a combination of ever improving genetics and improvements we have made to housing and nutrition all starting to come together. The sooner these animals enter the milking herd the better as they start returning our investment, which with current costs, is substantial.
Health checks
As a further check on how calves are performing we have started to use a new service that our vets have introduced, a vet tech service.
It’s carried out by newly graduated vets and not only gives them hands on experience of dealing with livestock on farm without someone looking over their shoulder, but also gets a job done on the farm that we rarely had time to do or, more often than not, didn’t do at all.
Another benefit is that we are not paying full vet rates to get a fully qualified vet to give our calves a thorough health check.
Luke – the vet tech – visits on a regular basis and vaccinates the calves with a pneumonia vaccine that can be administered intranasally from day one and covers them for three months, weigh bands the calves, takes blood samples to check for success of colostrum transfer and gives them a general once over.
Probably another job that we will look to let them take on is debudding which could be done at these visits as well. Early feedback has been positive, colostrum transfer has been on the whole excellent, with the most substantially above the required level with only a few borderlines which is borne out by the very low levels of scour and pneumonia that we get. Daily liveweight gains from birth to weaning are currently running at 0.84kg/day, which we are pleased with but are targeting 1kg/day which I think is well within reach.
Fine margins separate decent performance and excellent performance, and we are striving to improve at all times. In farming, as in any other profession, you should never be happy where you are and should always try to make things better.
Seeing our vet practice taking on two newly graduated vets and another that’s one year qualified to do farm work is very encouraging for both the large number of livestock farms in our area but also for the vet practice itself. Newly qualified vets, who want to go on and do farm vet work post-graduation, seem to be getting harder and harder to come by, and even harder to hold onto long term. Probably a bit like farming in general, there are easier ways to make money elsewhere.
Why should it be like that? At the end of the day, food production is the most important job of all. Without it the country would very quickly grind to a halt but politicians of all parties only seem to pay lip service to agriculture and in my opinion we are nowhere near as well respected as we should be.
The next generation
In fact, we are being used by the all-powerful supermarkets and processors to produce food for the very lowest price at the farmgate and yet food inflation is flagged up as one of the main drivers of overall inflation! Something is not quite right here, I think. Considering these wafer-thin margins, we need to work harder and put in more hours than should be expected to turn a decent profit, and then how do we attract the next generation into the industry?
The next generation of Logans at Holehouse are now moving into their teenage years and I’d like to hope that they would like to carry on the business we have built up, and that the business is profitable and resilient enough to allow them to make a good living from it. And to enjoy the lifestyle that we have, being the owners of our own businesses is something that many of their contemporaries could only dream of.
The bottom line is the returns must be there or they won’t carry the business on. The whole country has got to wake up and smell the coffee; pay farmers a fair price or UK produced food won’t be on the shelves.