It’s that time again to wish everyone a happy new year and reflect a bit on 2019, which seems to have flown by. An exceptional spring and summer for grass was followed by a very challenging autumn but, all in all, we can’t complain too much.

Milk prices could have been better for the year, but we’ve seen them a lot worse too.

As we start a new year, it’s a good time to take stock of where we are on the farm and where we hope to get to over the next year. We milked 300 cows at peak for most of 2018 and 2019 but we have 400 cows on hand to calve in for spring 2020. We have a lot of the facilities in place and the stock are there, but we also have a lot left to do over the next 12 months to get the farm fully organised to support those numbers.

We have a cubicle space for every cow, enough space for calving cows, shed space for all the calves and hopefully customers for most of the beef ones. This should help us to get through the busy spring period in good shape without too many health problems.

This parlour should be a game-changer for the farm and once it’s built, we can let the herd and the business grow around it

Slurry storage is another item on the “have” list but the “have not” list is long enough too. The milking parlour will be an issue for the first half of next year, but hopefully we can get that sorted by the autumn, with a bigger and more efficient model on the way.

We will have longer than optimum milking times for a while, but we have a good team in place to help get us over that hump. That team is another very important item on the “have” list and probably the most important thing to have in place when making big changes to any business.

There is also some extra ground coming into the milking platform this year to provide grazing for the extra cows and while most of it is up to speed, a couple of paddocks will need re-seeding in the short term. In an ideal world, this would get done early in any project, before it is stocked up fully, but we will see how it goes.

Whenever ground conditions dry up a bit, we also have some work to do with roadways, fencing and water troughs. As with any project, it’s all one-way traffic at the start, with funds needing to be invested, but we will prioritise getting the milking parlour and roadways in place as soon as possible and add the extras as we go. It’s all a challenge, but hopefully a positive one.

Rotary

The parlour was the biggest decision and the one that we agonised over the most. We tried to avoid pressing the nuclear button for as long as possible and avoid the eye-watering cost of a rotary parlour, but cow numbers have out-grown any options around the current site, so we will hopefully see a circular shape grow out of a greenfield site over the summer.

This parlour should be a game-changer for the farm and once it’s built, we can let the herd and the business grow around it. It’s good to be able to push the farm on but it comes with a lot of challenges too. Not least the increase in hours needed to be spent in the office, especially through the planning stage of the project.

Hopefully it will all be worth it and we can enjoy it at some stage after it’s all completed. For the moment we’ll try to enjoy the Christmas and new year break, take a few days off with the kids before calving and then get back into what’s looking like a very busy year.

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