Shropshire Farming Talk with Bronwen Bray, Walford College

 The cows are currently still enjoying some extra warmth inside until the weather improves. 

Just over five years ago we started to transition from an indoor all year round dairy system to a New Zealand style, pasture-based, Autumn calving system. 

This has taken a lot of planning, monitoring and adjustment, with the introduction of new genetics and systems, changes to the breeding cycles, layout of the farm and improvement of the grazing and infrastructure. 

For several years now the cows have been grazing outside for the majority of the year, with short periods of indoor housing during calving and bad weather. These changes have significantly reduced our costs and improved cow and calf health. 

The team have been focused for the past few months on hitting our breeding targets. We want to be in the top 5 per cent of high performing farms. 

This will ensure our cows calf within a short time period and the team can focus on each breeding stage. 

This has really helped our cow conception rates, reduce additional breeding costs, increase live birth rates and reduce any calf mortality. We have been constantly surprised by how well this has worked for our system, staff and students. 

We assess grass growth throughout the year to monitor the best times for grazing rotations and early spring turn out. 

The results have shown that the mid to late January turn out has benefitted the system when the winter has been relatively warm. The aim is to stimulate early grass growth, maintain cow health, welfare and also reduce over winter feed costs. 

We continually assess our performance against National KPI benchmarks. 

We have exceeded several of our targets and currently we have just passed week five of our breeding season with a submission rate of 96.5 per cent of cows served in the first three weeks. 

The number of cows showing signs that they will need breeding again is lower than any previous year. We will get a good picture with the first pregnancy scans taking place this week. 

We are getting an average of 27 litres a day of milk per cow with 2.2kg of mil solids. The milk income to purchased feed margin is 32.6ppl which will allow us to keep the cows housed for longer if the weather stays cold in January. 

We deliver level 1, 2 and level 3 qualifications in Agriculture, Animal Management, Equine and Motor Vehicle on site. We are also delivering the T level qualifications in Agriculture and Animal Management this year. 

These are working really well as they have enabled us to plan more hours of teaching, workshops, trips and industry placement per year due to the additional funding. 

As we move into Spring we are looking forward to our next Open Event on Saturday, February 8. There is no need to book and further information can be found on our website https://hlnsc.ac.uk or contact us on info@nsc.ac.uk.  

by Bronwen Bray,  Head of Walford Campus.