I hope you have all had a happy and peaceful festive season. It is mid-January and the hustle and bustle of the Christmas turkey rush seems like a long and distant memory.
The last of the grazing youngstock are now housed and lab samples indicated a winter worming application was required, so we turned our attention to youngstock. Over the years we have started foot-bathing youngstock where practical. We think this is a very worthwhile job.
Any heifers due to go with the bull are vaccinated before they are introduced. Apparently, managing herd health is greatly improved with this practice, in particular with BVD.
The Christmas holiday period allows us to take a little break but with staff holidays and stock fully housed, the reality is a very brief break indeed.
During the quieter spell I often put pen to paper to make notes on the list of jobs for next year. I had thought a single piece of paper would be ample but it soon seemed I was cultivating rather a large list.
As dairy farmers who breed our own replacements, choice of service sire is, in my opinion, vital.
One area which has come under great scrutiny in the recent past is the role of AHDB. Many people might question if they actually benefit from this organisation.
As someone who is interested in the information available at the time of making breeding decisions, my personal view is the AHDB dairy genetics department is vital.
Whether you farm dairy cows and use service sires that are all beef, therefore buying replacements or, like us, breeding your own, the amount of useful information is quite staggering.
Production and type are just the tip of the iceberg; health traits which include calf survivability, feed intake efficiency, TB resistance and Envirocow are all examples of indexes available to us.
I believe some may think these are populated with statistics given from the breeding companies. However, AHDB is the source of these numbers, gathering raw data at the milk recording level to provide unbiased, factual information to benefit all dairy farmers.
AHDB also ensures any adverts from breeding companies are not allowed to deliberately mislead potential customers.
Looking forward this year, there are many things I am hopeful for a large lottery win is up there but one of the single most important ones is to have UK farming and food accurately and fairly represented to the general public.
One good example of this is how George Eustice is calling for a carbon tax on imported produce. I believe this is to illustrate the differences in some efficiently produced UK food compared with potentially cheap produce from elsewhere in the world, with very different carbon characteristics.
Likewise, with Lord Debens comments reported in The Telegraph. He said: Farmed animals are crucial in tackling climate change, because grass-grazed livestock improve the ability of soil to store carbon.
Heres to a happy and prosperous New Year.
