Farmer Focus: Cows will be cool with 11 new fans this summer

This dry spring was a welcome change to last year. Everything seems to go so much smoother.

The in-calf heifers have been out at grass for a month or so, and the first six to calve have been brought back in for cubicle training.

See also: Guide to choosing a ventilation system for your dairy unit

About the author

Tom Hildreth

Livestock Farmer Focus writer Tom Hildreth and family grow grass and maize for the 130-cow herd of genomically tested 11,000-litre Holsteins near York supplying Arla. The Hildreths run a café, ice cream business and milk vending machine on the farm.

Read more articles by Tom Hildreth

We have just nicely started getting into our calving time and the work we have done behind the robots for the segregation is really coming into its own.

I have a straw pen for about five or six cows next to the collect pen for one of the robots.

This is so they can be milked twice a day and automatically routed back to their pen for two days, before joining the rest of the herd.

Vet and foot-trimming days are also made easier by the auto seg.

Ground conditions have been great for both the pre-maize cut of grass and main first cut.

There were no records broken by our grass yield this time, but I would always rather a small heap of quality silage than a big heap of belly fill.

I’ll be aiming for five cuts this year, and for the first time they will all be similar in acreage as the cows will be staying inside.

A decision not taken lightly, just kind of an obvious one for the first year of robot milking.

Eleven fans have been installed to keep the cows cool over summer and there are five more to install when I build my new dry cow shed next year.

I know our cows have suffered from heat stress in previous years while grazing and research suggests the unborn calf suffers as the mother does, leading to a reduced lifetime yield from the calf when she eventually joins the milking herd.

The maize was all drilled for the May bank holiday – and into moisture.

Dad kept the power harrow a couple of hours behind the plough to keep the soil from drying out.

The grass has had its bagged nitrogen and will get 10t of separated slurry applied an acre (25t/ha) through a trailing shoe.

As the solid has been removed, the juice that is left soaks into the soil and down to the roots without leaving any solids on top to hinder growth and contaminate the next cut.