Cows looking forward to their days in the sun
To start off with I’d like to introduce myself.
I’m Iain Canning and the new Farm Manager at Walford Farm. I’m married to Denise with three young children who have all fallen in love with Shropshire.
Originating from the central belt of Scotland, coming to sunny Shropshire was going to be a breeze – well that was until the temperature dropped from 15C to 5C and the winter came back to rear its ugly head.
On the farm spring is in the air. We have started lambing with some of the animal care students getting their first chance to see newborn lambs with some of them even getting to lamb some of the ewes.
We have mainly Welsh mule ewes lambing to the Texel tup. With a very healthy scanning percentage of 197 per cent it will be interesting to see how many lambs we end up with on the ground at the end of the lambing. I’ll let you know how we get on in my next instalment.
Over on the dairy side of the farm the late lactation cows are now out to grass. Our late lactation cows are made up of cows that are safely in calf and are 120 to 150 days in milk.
Everything was looking great with cows lying stretched out in the soft lush grass, soaking up the sun enjoying life. You can imagine their disgust when on Monday night I opened the gate and tried to persuade them to go out to their next new paddock. Yes, that plan had to be rethought and another mix of silage had to be made, those girls had different ideas. Late lactation cows were back in the shed.
Hopefully by the time you read this the warmer temperature will have returned and normal procedure will have resumed.
The early lactation cows are left in the shed and won’t be going out to grass until we get them back in calf. The reason for this is that the amount of energy a high yielding cow needs to maintain body condition and produce 40 litres of milk; we simply can’t get enough food into them with grass alone.
These girls will live in the shed eating an energy-rich diet and when back in calf and a bit further on in lactation, they will join their friends out in the sun as well.
Land work has been a bit of a start-stop affair with the weather ruling all again, but more on that next time.
Iain Canning is Farm Manager at Walford Farm, Walford campus
