This week’s Dairy Focus takes us to a farm where Breffni Daly, a young man from west Cork, has been managing a 1,500-cow operation on a large dairy farm just outside Shrewsbury, in England for the last four years.

After completing his level 6 dairy management degree in Clonakilty College, Daly spent four years from 2012 to 2016 on Sansaw Farms, until he decided to go back home to Ireland to look for opportunities in which he worked as a farm manager at Rathmurrin Dairies in Co. Wicklow.

In 2020, he was asked by farm owners, James and Asa Thompson, to come back and manage the Sansaw Farm, which consists of 850ha in total.

The milking platform is 550ha, with 300ha used for silage ground, heifer rearing, beef calf rearing and for wintering cows and heifers on fodder beet.

The farm tries to follow the New Zealand system as much as possible, with low inputs, grazing grass for the majority of the year, and out-wintering the majority of the cows on fodder beet.

Daly told Agriland that his way of farming is the same as what he was thought in college: “Never starve cows and never chase marginal milk.”

The facilities on the farm include a beef yard that can hold up to 900 calves, a heifer yard that can hold up to 550 heifers, a 70-bale Waikato rotary parlour, a collecting yard that can hold 700 cows, a feed pad that can hold 700 cows, a vet yard that can hold 300 cows, with the yard for the main herd comprising 880 cubicles as well.

Significant investment into infrastructure was made a couple of years back, with £5 million being pumped into the place, in which Daly said has left the place comfortable to keep on calves and beef stock to create value for them, while having the 1,500-cow dairy at a comfortable stocking rate.

Managing the 1,500-cow dairy farm

The farm has six underpasses with another two underpasses going under railway tracks and altogether the farm has 13km of farm roadways.

The cows on the farm are Jersey cross cows that weigh about 480 to 500kg and the cows consistently produce about a kilo of milk solids (MS) per kilo of live weight, producing just under 500kg MS/cow/year.

Daly tries to feed 750kg of meal/cow, but admits that its becoming more difficult to do so as he projects it to be upwards of 1.1t/cow for 2024.

Utilising the grass on the farm is the driver of production and performance, as the farm typically grows about 12t dry matter (DM)/ha and utilises over 10t of that.

The farm has a great focus on incorporating clover into their swards to keep fertiliser down and boost the cow’s performance.

The Sansaw Farm has quite a sandy soil, and so the farm suffers with droughts in the middle of the summer, but grows plenty of grass in the shoulders of the year.

To utilise the grass at the shoulders of the year and keep money coming in over the winter, Daly milks around 300 cull cows, late calvers and empty cows once-a-day into December and January, before letting them go before the February calving.

Daly currently has 1,700 cows and heifers in-calf, in which he will be selling a number of them before calving, leaving himself comfortable to have 1,500 cows milking well before spring.

Breeding

Daly runs a 10-week breeding season where he starts with the maiden heifers on April 25 and does not use a synchronisation programme to get them into heat, instead he identifies them naturally using scratch cards.

Daly has 500 replacement heifers coming into the herd every year and as a result, the average lactation in the herd is 3.7.

Daly prefers the heifers coming into heat naturally, as he has the staff and patience to do so, and uses a mix of sexed and conventional semen for the first 21 days for the heifers.

After the heifers are artificially inseminated (AI), the heifers will spend a day and a half at least in a paddock separate to where the bulls are mopping up.

Heifers are ran with pedigree Hereford bulls once they have served their day, and a half separated from the bulls, just to make sure that the money that was spent on a replacement straws is not undone by a stock bull’s semen.

Daly said that “we currently run it like a kiwi system, with Jerseys getting black and white semen and black and white heifers and cows getting jersey semen, but we are changing by using the herd improving tool to improve our genetics within the herd”.

“Bull selection is nothing fancy and is more focused on fertility and feet but in terms of what cow gets what, we put our best cows in-calf to dairy sexed or we aim too,” Daly added.

The cows undergo six weeks of Jersey or Holstein-Friesian semen, where there will be 500 sexed semen straws used, 300 conventional semen used, followed by beef straws with British Blue being used.

Daly achieved an 84% six week in-calf rate for the whole herd and over 70% three week in-calf rate for the heifers, and when the cows were scanned a couple of weeks ago, 13% of the herd came up empty.

Calving and wintering

Calving and wintering on a 1,500-cow system does not sound straight forward, but Daly has set the system up to be quite simple by utilising staff, facilities and the land.

Daly winters half the herd on cubicles where they will eat into the silage pit for the winter and the other half will be wintered on fodder beet, where they will also have access to fresh straw.

There could be four different mobs on the fodder beet of a maximum of 225 cows on each, where they will get a fresh strip of fodder beet each day, with a fresh top up of straw.

There is 38ha of fodder beet sown every year, and Daly said it works well year-on-year, as they set up temporary water troughs and put up back fences to make it work.

The paddocks that are chosen to go for fodder beet are paddocks that have been underperforming with poor grass growth, and as cows get closer to calving, they will be brought up into the cubicles where they can be closely monitored.

The fodder beet on the farm laid out with straw bales ready to go for winter grazing

During the calving season, the dry cows will be brought up into the rotary three times/week where heavy springing cows will be drafted out to keep in the straw yard which can hold up to 300 cows.

Cows start calving in late early February and when the farm is at the peak of calving, there could be 45-60 cows calving a day.

Once the majority of the cows have calved down, Daly will split up the 1,500-cow herd into the four different mobs of milking cows.

The first mob will consist of young cows and heifers and typically has about 600 cows in the herd. The second mob will be the ‘money makers’, cows that are in their their lactation or more and could have up to 800 cows.

The third mob is the once-a-day milking mob, which consists of cows in poor body condition, lame or has decreased production and is usually about 80 cows.

The final mob of cows is the penicillin group, cows producing milk that won’t be going into the bulk tank and are being treated for whatever reason.

Staff

Daly told Agriland that the best skill he has adopted since being on the farm is the skill of managing people, as he has full-time job on managing staff work schedules on top of the hands on work on the farm.

He has 14 full-time staff including himself with nine extra people coming in during the business of calving, where their roster is 11 days on and three days off for the whole year.

Daly tries to keep the staff rotating between yards, as any one member of staff could spend a week to 10 days down at the beef yard and then swap to herding and managing grass or milking cow.

In general, there will be team of workers rotating between yards every week and the way the roster works out, there will be three or four off every day.

Daly told Agriland that in order to successfully manage the 1,500-cow farm, he could spend two hours after milking on the whiteboard an evening, sorting out rosters, days off, and time-off for the two weeks ahead.

Daly emphasised that “I’m at nothing here without the great team of workers that I have here on the farm”, mentioning that it takes a great team working together to make the whole farm system flow smoothly.

Managing the 1,500-cow dairy farm

Breeding

Calving and wintering

Staff

Related Stories:

Dairy Focus: Milking 500 cows on two milking platforms

Dairy Focus: 2% empty rate with American Holstein genetics

Dairy Focus: Calving underway on 1,000-cow New Zealand farm

Jersey Holstein-Friesian

Creating an appetite for Irish meat and dairy in France

Dairy Focus: Cork man manages 1,500-cow farm in England