In this month’s NMR/RABDF Gold Cup column, Paul Broad reflects on the hot, dry summer, an early maize harvest, a custard cream-eating cow, and where not to keep your cash. Here’s a little hint: It’s not in the Aga…
What a summer we haver had. We have been growing maize since 1992, and this is only the third time it’s been harvested in September – it was all cut and clamped by September 15. The average yield was 37.5t/ha at 35% dry matter, which was excellent considering the lack of moisture. We had drilled all the maize by April 28, and if these hot, dry summers continue, we need to get the crop in the ground by the end of April to give it the best possible chance for a respectable yield. It becomes an expensive crop to grow if you’re only getting 25t/ha.
We cut all our silage fields when it started to rain. Usually, you tell people how many bales you get to the acre, but this year it was the other way round, as it took five acres to get one bale – I’m afraid to work out what each bale cost, but it had to be done.
We applied 40 units of nitrogen/acre and the grass is growing well. It’s had some rest during the year, and with the milder winters we are having, it never stops growing. After its summer holiday, it’s now motoring away, and hopefully we’ll have a decent yield by the beginning of October.
Slurry spreading
With excellent ground conditions for harvesting maize and not bringing mud onto the roads, we are taking the chance to spread more slurry and lower the levels in the stores before our nitrate vulnerable zone (NVZ) closed period starts. We have a front topper/Sumo combination to prepare the maize stubble for grass seeds and cover crop mixtures, and the winter wheat will be drilled this month.
We have calved a lot of cows and heifers over the past two months, and we are averaging over 40kg/day again, but this is also due to the cows eating more total mixed ration (TMR). Up until two weeks ago, there were always 30-35 cows on the computer with reduced eating times every day – this is now down to five or six a day. Our pregnancy rate is still at 30%, which I am happy with, but whether we can keep it at that level, time will tell. All the cows calving now have developed their eggs for the next lactation during all the hot weather, so I’m expecting it to be harder to get cows in calf over the next six months. I’ve heard some spring calving herds are getting twice as many negative pregnancy diagnoses as usual, resulting in fewer cows to calve next spring.
Our milk price has been creeping up slowly; it’s funny how the milk price always comes down fast but rises slowly, but now, with the cost of our inputs rising rapidly, it needs to get to 45ppl quickly to cover our increased cost of production. I’ve bought all our youngstock blend for the next 12 months but held off buying dairy cow blend; everybody said the rapemeal was going to get cheaper, well, that didn’t happen, did it? Thanks, Mr Trump. We are now going to have to pay another £50/t.
Looking on the bright side, if there is one, we will only pay £30/t more than last winter as we dropped £20/t for the blend we have used this summer. But all our other costs are rising substantially, whether it is fuel, repairs or electricity, so the dairy industry needs a higher milk price to make the numbers stack up.
We have had two farm walks lately; one was a local young farmers club plus several parents to have a good look around, ending with a barbecue. The second was a group of dairy farmers from Cork in Ireland. They stayed in Cornwall for five days visiting several different dairy farms. They were very interested in what we do and asked plenty of questions.
They have also had their hottest, driest summer ever; brown fields had been unheard of for them. They also had a poor milk price this year, but one advantage is that their rate of income tax is only 12%.
I know farmers don’t like paying tax, but every good dairy business should be paying tax. I believe that after paying tax, what’s left is yours. We have put money into pensions in good years to reduce our tax payments, but from next year that money is added in for inheritance tax, so we will be taxed on it when we die.
Our Government is not helping our industry and is stopping farmers from investing in the future. If it’s not careful, we will have empty supermarket shelves as our self-sufficiency gets lower every year.
Over the years, we have had many cows with great characters. FB286 (Cutie) was our first cow to do 100t; she had a deep udder, so when we milked her, she had to step up on a board in the parlour, which enabled us to get another lactation out of her and reach that 100t. We have FB11 (Cleopatra), who always comes over to see anyone when they come into the cubicle shed, and Chloe; our artificial inseminator, is always taking selfies with her arm around her neck. Now we have FB36 (another Cutie), the quietest cow we have ever had.
Amanda, our relief milker, has a four-year-old grandson who met FB36 on our open day and struck up a friendship, so during the summer holidays he came over to see her. FB36 was lying in the cubicles, so he went in and stroked her; he also brought her a treat of custard cream biscuits, which she proceeded to eat off his hand – whatever next!
Finally, to a story some friends told us, which happened over 40 years ago. They wanted to build an extension on their house, so they put in a field of swedes which they sold and raised £8,000 in cash, which they kept in a tin. When they wanted to go on holiday, they asked both their workmen to look after it, but they declined. As they had turned off their Aga, they put it in there for safekeeping.
The day after coming home from holiday, on the way back from market, the farmer was driving down the lane when he saw smoke coming out of the chimney. He sped down the lane, rushed into the house, and with smoke billowing everywhere, retrieved the tin. The moral of the story – it’s always safer to keep your money under the mattress.
PS: Only the top layer of notes was smouldering.