Shropshire Farming Talk: Walford College Farm
At Walford, we are steadily approaching the end of the academic year with students now completing their final assessments, going on trips and preparing for next year.
As always the Farm team are keeping one eye on the weather, with perfect timing on the silage cuts and fodder beet drilling before any more rain arrived.
The decision to increase the grazing platform last year and increase the seed drilling rate on the grazing platforms really paid off with a bumper first silage cut, increased milk output from the cows and a healthy group of growing youngstock thriving on the additional grazing.
Over the last few years we have worked to get the herd and systems more sustainable, so that we can buffer the constantly changing and often unpredictable changes in milk price (a drop of around 12ppl over the last six months) along with the fluctuating and often volatile increases in running costs.
This goes hand in hand with planning for changes in the weather and the additional environmental and biological pressures faced by the industry.
The changes made in the last three years have been really successful for us and have resulted in the opportunity this year to start our next stage of increasing stability and profits.
The smaller cross bred cows have been great at producing great quality milk from forage with significantly lower feed costs. They are exceptionally hardy and very happy to be out through winter. We have brought another 70 cows into the system last month, so that our herd size, including our home bred replacements will now meet our Autumn target of 250 cows in milk. This has already increased the volume of milk produced by 1,000 litres per day.
If you walk the fields you will have seen some of our rapidly growing calves and youngstock. They are an essential part of the college training for students and therefore when the 67 replacements come into the herd next year they will be very used to being handled which makes the introduction to the dairy a lot easier.
On our long list of “jobs to be done” after the silage, fencing, fertilising, lambing, fodder beet and of course daily milking, we have added an extra job for summer of putting over 3,000 sleepers onto our sand tracks.
Stabilising the tracks with sleepers has been on the wish list for a while as it will help reduce injury from uneven ground, stabilise the tracks and reduce erosion of the soil, caused by the daily cow movements. This will have the added benefit of reducing maintenance costs and reducing any leg problems in the cows.
Our open day for prospective students to meet staff and look around is on Saturday, June 17.
As we are moving to the end of term we are also providing extra tours during the evenings and we will shortly be starting up our Animal Adventure weekend courses again.
If you want any more information please contact us on 01939626100 or info@nsc.ac.uk
Bronwen Bray, Walford College Farm
