I am a partner in a family dairy farming partnership that farms on the edge of the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire with my brother and our wives. The partnership was started by my brother and I’s Grandfather and Father when they purchased the farm in 1952, although my Grandfather had been a farmer in his own right on a smaller farm 10 miles away which he had paid for by working in a factory at night and working on his farm during the day, with the help of my father when he came home after school. We now milk 125 autumn block calved high output Holstein cows through two Lely Astronaut A3 robots installed in 2010. Prior to installing the robots we milked through an 11:22 swing over herringbone parlour installed in 2002. I also manage the dairy unit at Lydney Park Estate for Lord Bledisloe, which now milks 800 Jersey cross cows (expanding to 1,000 cows in 2016) once a day on a low cost grazing based system. This unit has changed radically from the one that I took over, which was a fully housed high output system milking 350 pedigree Holstein three times a day.

The breeding policy for the family partnership never seemed to have any continuity. This in some ways was acceptable when the majority of bulls available were predominantly of Friesian type, but as more extreme Holsteins became available and the black and white breeds became more polarised, it started to become more of an issue. By 1990 we had within a matter of a few years gone from using MMB Sunnylodge Supreme (Holstein) to Crewipool Emperor (British Friesian) to Riverdown Jester (Holstein) to Crocketts Pollux (New Zealand Friesian) and back to another Holstein, Linde Alfred. Each time we change breed and tack it was always for the same reason. The reason being was to breed a more profitable cow. The problem was that we just did not know what the best combination of drivers was for profitability in a cow. We knew it was a combination of type, milk yield, milk quality, fertility and longevity but we just did not know what the best combination was. By the early 1990’s we were still struggling with the combination of drivers for the profitable cow but had become more convinced (rightly or wrongly) it lay somewhere in the Holstein breed and became more consistent users of the breed. It was during this period that we started using PIN (Profit index) the forerunner of PLI (Profit lifetime index) to help us make breeding decisions. This we believed was the answer to our breeding conundrum of the correct combination of profitability drivers. (It actually was only the first step in the right direction as several things had been left out of the equation such as conformation and health traits). During this period we used bulls such as Skalsumer Sunny Boy, Jabot, F16 Rocket, Eastland Cash and Etazon Leaf. As this decade progressed and more and more of these high PIN bulls, daughters started to enter the herd, we started to feel that at long last we were starting to move in the correct direction.

In 2001 the herd was unfortunately slaughtered out due to Foot and Mouth (F&M). Obviously this was a particularly bad time to be on the farm, but looking back at it from some distance today, it was a time of good opportunity for the farm and one that we did not miss. During the time without any livestock on the farm we had time to look back at what we had been doing on the farm prior to F&M. Where we were making money and where we were not. Also it gave us the chance to set up the farm in a way that was more family friendly. We needed a farming system that allowed for people to have more time off, and actually take periods away from the farm for holidays. As part of this plan we decided to drop cow numbers back from 155 to 130 but get the same total yield for the herd and calve them all in a late summer (July– mid-October) block. This we realised would be quite a challenge but it was one we were non-negotiable on, because I had a young family that I wanted to spend more time with, my brother had just got married and our father was approaching his 70th birthday.

Just prior to F&M the herd had started to show quite an improvement in yields due to the use of the high PIN genetics. We decided as part of our plan to continue to using high PIN genetics, infact to make sure that we did not fall short of our plan for a more profitable farm with less cows we included in the plan to put together a herd in the top 1% for PLI. So on restocking the farm we made the decision to use PLI (PIN had now change over to PLI) as the sole criteria for the purchase of the entire replacement herd. When we started restocking the farm in the late summer of 2001 there was a large selection of cattle available for purchase, so I was entrusted by my father and brother to source 130 high PLI bulling heifers. The way I did this was slightly radical, in that I did not go and look at the heifers. I would telephone the vendor and ask them if all bulling heifers were in the top 5% of genetics for PLI (at the time this was above 50 I think). If they said they were and could verify this with the appropriate paperwork, we bought them there and then over the telephone. The 130 bulling heifers were sourced from 6 different farms in England and Wales and a group of 10 were imported from the Netherlands as incalf in May 2002.

We started serving all the heifers to easy calving high PLI Holstein bulls in October 2001 so that we would recommence milking in 2002. This gave us some time to replace the old herringbone parlour and do some other renovation work on the farm buildings that we never seemed to have time to do before.

In November 2002 some 4 months after we had restarted milking, I was approached to take over the management of the dairy unit at Lydney Park Estate. Fortunately with the new simpler system with block calving and not rearing all calves (something we had used to do) it allowed me to take over this unit on a part time basis. At the time this was a fully housed dairy unit of 350 pedigree Holsteins as mentioned earlier. The breeding of this herd had once again been without focus and had mainly been driven by cost of semen and not much else. This I changed once again to be PLI driven but within tight budgetary constraints. 

As time went on the owner of the estate Viscount Bledisloe wanted to get a better return for his investment in dairy farming and requested myself and the farms manager Gavin Green to look into ways of making a better return for the dairy unit and the rest of the farm. As part of our research into different options we looked to see what if any advantages our dairy unit had, and being situated in the middle of what could be 335 hectares of grazing, that at the time was mostly in arable rotation, with no roads to cross cows over was by far the most obvious. We therefore went to visit a number of grazing based dairy farms and took some advice from a grazing consultant Mike Bailey in drawing up a detailed budget. After sense checking these budgets with other farms the decision was made in 2007 to change the system from a fully housed dairy unit to a grazing based unit.

It quickly became obvious that the PLI was not quite the correct index to be used for breeding, as the Holstein cows we had were too large and heavy for our heavy clay soils and also lacked the extreme fertility required for a tight spring block calved herd. Being a fan of the PLI index I wondered if there was a version of the index for grazing based systems. The only one available at the time was the BW (Breeding Worth) index used in New Zealand, so we immediately started using this index for our breeding decisions. On a visit to the Moorepark research station in Southern Ireland in 2008 we came across the research that Jersey cross Holsteins were actually the best animal for the grazing dairy system, so from 2008 we started to cross our Holstein cows with Jerseys rather than our original choice of New Zealand Friesian. This was relatively straight forward as the BW index is an across breed index so we could very easily see which bulls would be the best for us to use. We continued to use the BW index until 2011 when I was introduced to the EBI (Economic Breeding Index) from Southern Ireland. This index although very similar to the BW was more appropriate to our system in the UK and where we ourselves at Lydney Park Estate were coming from. Especially the high weighting on fertility, as the Irish had had a problem within their national herd and so had we at Lydney Park Estate plus the values it put on its milk constituents. So in 2011 we started to use the EBI and still use it until today, although this year we will be using it in conjunction with the new SCI (Spring Calving Index) developed by AHDB Dairy. My hope is that over the next few years the few wrinkles that are in the SCI – in that a number of the newer New Zealand and Irish bulls are not listed – so that we at Lydney can make this index that is developed specifically for UK spring block calving herds the only index we use. 

Now in 2016 after solely using breeding indexes for breeding decisions at home we have a herd of high yielding Holstein cows that are fertile and easy to manage and only by coincidence as it was never in our plan, the highest PLI herd in the UK. They yield in excess of 10,200 litres of which over 4,700 litres come from forage. Whilst feeding no fancy products such as yeasts, fats or even minerals, (the only minerals are in the concentrate fed in the robots). The herd is block calved from early July until mid-October with an empty rate (cows chosen to breed but failing to get in calf) of between 12% and 15%. Which to a low input spring calving herd would not be a great figure but I believe is more than acceptable for the high yielding system we have. All of these things I believe are hugely important if a dairy farm is to be profitable in these times of volatility.

At Lydney Park Estate we have seen not only the grazing system prove itself but have seen the type of animal we milk rapidly change to the requirements of the low input grazing based system we need in just 3 generations. This being robust, highly fertile cows with a desire to graze in challenging conditions, that produce high percentages of fat and protein in their milk. The conception rates to service have gone from 40% to any service when we first started the grazing system with the Holsteins (31% when they were fully housed) to 59% during the last breeding season and the empty rate has dropped from over 20% to 9% in 2015. Whilst milk yields have dropped considerably over the period (around 10,000 litres when fully housed to just above 4,000 litres) the profitability of the farm has increased dramatically.

So looking back at the decision we made back in 2002 to use breeding indexes as our sole breeding decision maker. I am sure we would not be in the fortunate position we are today with robust, easy care, profitable cows that fit our systems and put us in a strong position for the future years of volatile milk prices, if we had not done so.