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Down In Devon
July 2007
Hello to everyone again from sunny Devon!!!
It's hard to believe another month has gone by again, it
must be a sign of me getting older! I know that I was always told not to wish my time away, but I sure am glad to see the back of what I can only describe as the wettest, worst July I have ever
known.
We have had more rain in July than we had in January, February, March or April. As I said in last months
diary all the cows had to be re-housed in late June, they have been in every night of July and every day of July except for four days. This has put us in a very difficult position as we have used
just over 250 round bales of haylage (these bales were being ear-marked for feeding in the Autumn), we are reluctant to start feeding our 1st cut silage so we have now started zero grazing. For
those of you that don't know, zero grazing is cutting fresh grass and bringing it into the cows to eat in their feeding yards. Fortunately we have front linkage and P.T.O. which enables us
to put both our mower and round baler on the same tractor. With doing this we only need to travel over the wet ground once, hopefully making as little mess and damage to the fields as
possible. We are now having a job to find any dry enough areas in the fields to even go zero grazing on because it just won't stop raining.
With the cows being housed so long, all the extra cow slurry is also a major headache. The slurry pit is
now full and as fast as we push the slurry in it keeps coming back at us! Normally by now the 2nd cut silage would have been made at least 5 – 6 weeks ago, and all the cow slurry would have
been spread on the 150 acres of grass stubble. This then normally grows us some free grass which we then set stock graze with the dairy cows from about the first week of August and leading into the
Autumn. We normally get a good flush of reasonably cheaply produced milk, at a time when our seasonally adjusted milk contract with Dairy Crest is at its highest level, but at the moment we still
havn't been able to do our 2nd cut silage, it has now been growing for about 12 weeks and the grass has gone yellow and rotten at the bottom, and very stemmy. The docks have also all gone to
seed and the silage fields now look more like stunted brown forests than grass.
The cows had been coughing badly for about 10 days so on the 1st of July we decided to use a pour on wormer to
kill the lung worm. Up to about 5 years ago we never had to drench the cows for lung worm but now if we don't they just keep on coughing and drop in their milk yield quite badly, we didn't
do them quickly enough last year and three got very ill with pneumonia. The only pour on that is licensed to use on milking cows is Eprinex. We needed 7.5 litres to do all the milkers and this
cost £515.00! If only we could make this much of our milk.
On the 3rd July we had to bring the dry cows in and re-house them as well because they were poaching the ground
up badly. We did the dry cows with a pour on wormer when they came in, they were also coughing badly. Because the dry cows are not being milked they can be done with a different pour on wormer
called Ivomec, this wormer is a lot cheaper and would have cost about £140.00 to do all the milkers, but it's not licensed for use on milking cows, the drug companies seem to have us over a barrel.
As I mentioned in last months diary we had to buy another self propelled forage harvester because ours
caught fire during our 1st cut. The harvester we bought was only a 2 wheel drive model, so we have sourced and fitted a second hand 4 wheel drive axle, this has taken us about a week to do in
between milking, scraping up, straw chopping the cubicles and zero grazing, but at least the forage harvester won't get stuck now!
On the 18th July we decided to mow 25 acres out of the 150 acres of 2nd cut silage grass, this is
our driest ground and we hoped it wouldn't make to many ruts in the fields. We started harvesting the grass at 9.30 a.m. on the 19th July and at 12.30 p.m. we had a thunder storm and had to
abandon ship with about 3 acres left on the ground. It is now nearing the end of July and we have already started feeding the silage to the cows that we made on the 19th, it's very wet stuff but
they seem to be eating it o.k. The milk has dipped now by about 250 litres a day, but we hope it will pick up again when the cows go out to grass.
July certainly has gone out with a bang, we had a freshly calved cow go off her food so we called out the vet,
she said it was a twisted stomach. One option is to operate on the cow, but she went down and couldn't stand up again so the operation was out of the question as they have to be standing for
this to be done. This morning (31st July) I looked in the shed before I started milking and the cow was dead!
On a lighter note I mentioned I was getting older earlier in the diary, my two boys have now broken up for the
summer holidays and the eldest one has just had his last day at primary school, how the years fly by.
Until next month all the best
Steve
Down in Devon.
P.S. I have included an extract from our local vets newsletter on T.B. in cattle, also I have included some average market prices from our area.
P.P.S. I've no wish for my diary to become political but I was delighted to see the back of Tony Blair !
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