The right cow for the system is lifting farm profits

The system operated at Lydney Park Farm has famously changed tack, switching from a fully housed, intensive set-up to one based almost entirely on grazing. While this has led to a decline in production from around 10,000 litres to well under half this amount, the enterprise profits have significantly more than doubled.

That this has been achieved with once-a-day milking and annual production of just 3,750 litres per cow may seem surprising, but improved grassland utilisation, reduced costs of production and breeding the right cow for the system have each contributed significantly to this success.

Farm manager, Keith Davis, who is the driving force behind the changes and the continued success of the herd, says getting the right kind of cow has been a process of trial and error. “We started with a herd of Holsteins and immediately bred to a mixture of Friesian and Jersey genetics, quickly realising we wanted a cow that was three quarters Jersey and one quarter Friesian,” he says.

Following the prevailing trend at that time amongst grazing-based producers, he initially opted to select his service sires on New Zealand’s Breeding Worth (BW) and Ireland’s Economic Breeding Index (EBI).
“Coming from a Holstein base we had a lot of milk volume but poor fertility and low fat and protein percentages, so these were things we wanted to correct,” he says.

He also describes the milk contract he had at the time, which imposed an extra haulage charge for volume because of the farm’s location outside his buyer’s milk field.

The fact that the herd is milked through a 32-point rotary parlour also has a bearing on his 20-litre target as anything giving much more than this will slow the system down.
“It takes 7.5-8 hours to milk 1,000 cows and we don’t want to take any longer, but cows giving 30 litres usually have to do an extra rotation,” he says.

Commenting on the increasing domination in the herd by VikingGenetics, he says that as well as the bulls’ performance on £SCI, he likes the long-term emphasis on breeding for hoof and udder health over many years.

“The Danish bulls we have used in the past which now have UK daughters milking, have come through with good figures for the UK’s comparable traits, like Lameness Advantage and Mastitis Index,” he says.

Daughters of bulls such as VJ Link and VJ Tester have contributed to good locomotion scores across the herd, which (on a scale of 0-3) show only 0.5% of the herd scoring 3, 6% scoring 2, and 6% scoring 1, with the remainder scoring 0 and showing perfect locomotion.

“We footbath five times a week and are very happy with these scores,” he says.

The ultimate test of the policy is in the financial performance, and Keith says veterinary costs and overall costs of production have been slashed since the breeding and management changes were made.
“Even when we had Holsteins on this system the finances started to come right,” he says. “We just knew we had to have different genetics to make it work properly.”

With today’s Jersey-Friesian mix he says costs of production have declined to 24p/litre, but he’d like to cut that further.

“Yes, we are making a profit but I can’t tell you what,” he says. “But it’s substantially more than we made under the old, intensive system.”

Text: Ann Hardy