Tom Rawson’s milk budget is back on track
After two months of being way up on the milk budget, we have finally fallen back onto the red line on the graph on the dairy office wall. A great autumn will have certainly helped the forage budget for the winter, and every day still at grass is worth a saving of around 25kg of fresh weight clamp silage for every cow.
Unlike last year, we have had a couple of difficult calvings. The best skill you can have in your armoury is experience, and as our young team is in a “building experience phase” I would like to take this opportunity to thank George Smithson who manages the beef side of our neighbour’s business – he is now officially the fourth emergency service.
The other Sunday we visited some friends – Rob and Kelly up in the Yorkshire Dales – to inspect their new baby. As well as being a sheep farmer Rob also does pregnancy scans, so when Catherine announced that she was pregnant he offered to scan her. While I had visions of cow crush, arm length gloves and a camera on a lead, luckily Rob was thinking Catherine laid on the sofa using an external sheep scanner. The result was thankfully “one lamb”.
Finally, good luck to one of the younger members of the team, Tom Stamp, as he heads off to study Agriculture at Harper Adams. Tom has replaced himself with another local arable farmer’s son, George Grant. Swapping ‘le Chameau’s’ for ‘Nora’s’ is always the first challenge.