Kilconieron Farm Focusing on the Core Business – Milk

John McCabe from the Teagasc Aurivo Farm Profitability Programme caught up with David Gannon, who is the Focus Farmer for Co. Galway.

I milk 160-170 cows here with my wife Deirdre in between Loughrea and Athenry on a farm that is part owned and part leased and is split up by the road. My father Robbie and mother Mary are also involved in different capacities so it really is a family run farm.

We got into milk in 2018 when I came home from Medtronic to convert the farm from sucklers and calf-to-beef. I am delighted with the move. It allowed me to come home full time farming. I love dairying and I try to keep a positive attitude towards it. My motto is that you can’t be venting in the house or in the community about how bad farming is and then expect people to want to choose farming as their career. It is intense at times but it is also very flexible in terms of family life and managing your own time – which is a huge positive of dairy farming. We have a few people helping us on a part time basis. Another major positive of the industry is that we can offer local flexible employment and I really enjoy working with the lads too.

In our efforts to sell more milk, two major areas we have been focusing on through the Aurivo-Teagasc Joint-Programme have been the herd and the soil. 

In terms of the milking herd, we have started to move on cows that have proved themselves to be breaking even at best. There is no point in milking a cow that is only covering her costs. Due to being new enough into dairying – we had been holding on to all cows in our efforts to grow the herd. We are becoming stricter on what cows we milk. Grass and silage growth over the last two years have been hard earned due to the weather so we need to make sure everything that is grown is going into an animal that will turn a profit. I picked the cows to cull from the C.O.W. profile on ICBF Herdplus using their milk records /calving date/expected calving date.

We are also focusing on improving the weights of our heifers from baby calf stage until they reach the parlour. Sometimes in the past, there would be heifers joining the milking herd that may not have reached their full potential due to missing target weights and I can definitely see that in the cows I have culled this year – some of them would have been behind target going to the bull as a heifer, as subsequently wouldn’t have matured into the good milking cow we need.

We have 50 weanling heifers this year and we weighed them on the last days of August. They were split into two groups based on the "Heifer and Cow Weight" profile on ICBF Herdplus. The heifers that were behind target flagged up red.  These heifers were fed 2kg of a 16% nut and were weighed 55 days later on 18 October. The ADG was 1.09kg/day for the period and there are only two or three now that are behind so I am happy with that.

Another major focus area is the soil. I have lime, 0:7:30 and 0:0:50 spread anywhere that needed it. I find the 0:0:50 (MOP/Potash) very simple. I spread one bag to the acre of it on the index 2 soils over the autumn. I’m happy to spend on soil fertility so that we get the full bang for our buck from Nitrogen next year, plus, we have clover on the farm and it should help it perform too.

I’m not a fan of driving milk from meal or things that cost a lot but I am a fan of driving more milk from good practice and that’s what I am going after. Better heifers weights, culling passenger cows and building the soil fertility.