|
Down In Devon 
June 2007
First of all I would like to thank David and Sue for the Web Site they have created; Farms Direct
.org. It is a fantastic idea and very professionally put together, well done to you both.
We've had to re-house all the milking cows again by day and by night.
When we first saw the FarmsDirect.org web site I said to my wife that perhaps I
could do a monthly "Farmers Diary" for it, I'm not much of a scholar but here goes!
I am married with two boys aged 11 and 9, I farm in partnership with my Father,
Mother and my Brother, who is also married with two young boys.
We are a traditional family farm employing no outside labour. My brother and I
do the milking ourselves, we also do our own silage making with a self propelled harvester, we used to do a lot of contract silage making, but four of our customers
were taken out in the foot and mouth year, two of whom decided not to re stock after it was all over. They have since planted their farms into trees, the other two
came back with less stock and now do their own silage making with round balers.
We are mainly dairy farmers with 160 milking cows, about 100 are British Friesian
the other 60 are Montbeliarde cross British Friesian cows. We decided a few years ago to try the Montbeliarde breed because we supply the Dairy Crest Davidstow
milk factory which makes the Cathedral City and Davidstow cheeses, the Montbeliarde milk is very high in protein and also has high Kappa Casein B.B
variants which makes their milk excellent for cheese making. The Montbeliarde milk also has high Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA's) which have been proven to be
anti carcinogenic. We rear our own heifer replacements and also sell the beef breed calves which are Limousin crosses and any Friesian bull calves at our local livestock market.
The fantastic weather in the spring meant that we could turn the cows out to grass
early (April 1st). It is always nice to see the cows eating fresh grass with the sun on their backs, also it cuts down on all the yard work (scraping out the slurry,
straw chopping and bedding up the cow cubicles, and feeding the silage to the cows).
The cows milk yield went up by about 500 litres a day when they went out to
grass by day and night, unfortunately we are on a seasonally adjusted contract with Dairy Crest and just when there's a flush of milk in the spring and early
summer, you've guessed it, they drop the price of our milk! We've just received our May milk cheque and we were paid 15.30 pence per litre.
With the Milk Development Councils (M.D.C.) recently published "production cost
figures" showing costs have increased 16% to around 21.3 pence per litre, it's little wonder that another 16% of the UK's producers intend to quit within the next two years.
However we've just received a letter from Dairy Crest saying that our milk price is
to rise by 0.04 pence per litre from 1st July 2007, this is very welcome news, but we feel with world dairy commodity prices booming we should be receiving more.
We were also lucky with our first cut silage which we did in wonderful weather on
the 2nd and 3rd of May, this should be excellent silage and will help to produce a good winters milk. Unexpectantly our self propelled harvester caught fire and
completely burnt out part way through the first day of harvest, luckily no one was hurt, the fire brigade were fantastic and were in the field putting out the fire within
less than 10 minutes from the mobile phone call. After a bit of a tussle with the insurance company, we have been paid the amount we were paying premiums on
and have now replaced the harvester ready for 2nd cut.
Unfortunately now we're at the end of June and as you all know it just cannot stop
raining! We were ready to do our second cut of silage about ten days ago but the ground and grass were both too wet. The grass has all gone to seed now and I'm
afraid the milk producing quality has gone also. The farm has a very heavy clay subsoil, typical of this part of Devon and we've had to re-house all the milking
cows again by day and by night. Hopefully the sun will start to shine again soon!
On a lighter note my boy's school sports day has been postponed three times already so things must be bad!
See you next month
All the best
Steve,
Down In Devon.
|
