Dairy Update Farmer Focus: Dale Whalley is awaiting heifers from Germany

The flight chaos created an eerie silence on the farm. It was strange hearing the planes taking off from Manchester.

I had to cancel my trip to Germany to select heifers and only hope I’m refunded the £650 for the two flights. I needed to reach Leipzig in eastern Germany.

The heifers are still arriving next week after being selected by my regular Dutch agent. A price of £1445 a head for 34 fresh calved heifers delivered here is still a huge saving on UK prices. Daily production should reach nearly 7000 litres but with 250 cows milking we will reduce numbers by selling barrens before our TB test.

Last week we PD’d our first group of heifers, these were born out of in-calf heifers I bought a few months before we officially started calving to Holsteins. The group of eight will calve on average at 24 months, 50% held to first service and are pregnant to sexed semen. I must admit to finding it challenging to AI bulling heifers and also getting the timing of service right. Cervix’s that are the size of pencils are far more difficult to thread an AI gun through.

Maize fields are ready for sowing, but with a frost every morning recently and no rainfall for three weeks the weather needs to alter for the seeds to germinate. Katy is the only variety we are sowing this year, which we grew on some fields last year, those fields were ready five days earlier and yielded 5% more. We have about 1000t of maize silage left which should allow us to feed 20kg a cow to the high group and maintain some maize in the low groups TMR.

When this is printed we should know the outcome of the election. We live in one of the safest Tory seats, with George Osborne as our MP. I wish we could use our vote elsewhere, in a marginal seat that the Tory’s need to win.