Farmer Focus: Silage stocks extended with new heifer ration

Our grass is looking better now, just before fourth cut, than it has all year. Undoubtedly, this is due to the recent British weather we have longed for since May.

This week will see the well-timed maize chopped – as the wholecrop is about to run out – and clamped, as well as our final grass cut of the year.

I should have enough forage for the cows to see us through to next May.

See also: Advice on siting a new dairy building in the farmyard

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

However, the heifers will have their silage, barley straw and cake diet replaced with pea straw, pot ale syrup and rolled barley to stretch the silage out a little longer.

The new calf shed has been high up on my list of things to do and building is now getting underway. The concrete panels are in and the internal gate posts will be set this week.

I have been unsure of how to drain the calf shed, but based on sheds I have seen, and my own experience with our current setup, I have decided to run a 500mm-deep slurry channel with slats down the middle of the centre feed passage.

A 2% fall on the concrete from the back of the pens to the channel will drain the pens both when in use and for washing out between batches.

I’ll have nine pens, which will be enough to keep at least two pens clean and resting at any one time.

Because one building project isn’t enough, I have also been converting the old milking parlour.

Most of it has been taken out and is at a new home, but while the stall work was still in, we found it a handy place to dry cows off and treat the occasional mastitis case.

With this in mind, I decided to shorten the pit down to three stalls for drying off, and keep the remaining nine places down one side as a herringbone treatment race.

The long-term goal is to make every job in the cow shed as easy as possible, and this conversion from milking parlour to treatment race will help considerably, especially as it is well placed in relation to the robots and the routed cows.