Myself, Judith and son Tom run a 120 cow herd of pedigree Holstein cows at Curlew Fields Farm near York. We developed the current green field site in 2003, moving in 2004 after our landlord expressed a desire to develop Laburnum Farm, our old tenanted farm for housing. This was a fantastic opportunity for us as space was severely limited in the village farmyard and most of the neighbouring farmyards had been developed for housing, we worked with our landlord to obtain planning permission. We successfully achieved planning permission for a new farm on a greenfield site which we purchased from the landlord, with other land we owned and rented in the parish we now farm over 180 acres. Our desire had always been to move to a green field site so we limited investment at Laburnum Farm, in hindsight, this was a mistake as we were limited to 30 cows and it took over 20 years to fulfil our dream while buildings fell apart around us and the business stood still.

In 2012 I was given the opportunity to visit the US after winning Asda Dairy Farmer of the Year. I jumped at the opportunity and the new found knowledge and enthusiasm was fundamental to our farm developments. Having initially put loose housing in at Curlew Fields we replaced this with deep sand bed cubicles and upped numbers from 80 cows in 2013. I’m a fanatical about loafing space and ensured cows have 6.5m²/cow inside and a further 3.5m² of loafing area outside. We have since grown the herd at roughly 5 milkers per year, not fast enough, some might say but it works for us!

My trip to the US also transformed our heifer rearing. The main change was to increase the amount of milk powder fed up to 1kg/calf/day of a quality skim based powder. Growth rates were fantastic but we suffered with issues with growth rate checks at weaning, by dropping the amount fed to 875g the problem was resolved. 100% of calves now reach our target of doubling birthweight by 8 weeks of age, they now have a pretty seamless and complete weaning before 9 weeks old.

In August 2015 we were approached by AHDB Dairy to become one of their Calf to Calving host farms. This has been a great opportunity to refocus our attention on calves and heifers while picking the brains of likeminded people. The key focus has been around reducing mortality, reducing age at first calving and rearing the heifers efficiently and economically.

Heifer rearers must target 22–23 months age at first calving, those animals calving at 32 months, costing £745 above the average are not sustainable for any business.

When 10 heifers from the study calved in I was very disappointed. We’d missed our minimum target of calving by 24 months by 10 days. Not a lot I hear you say? For our business with 100 cows, a 20% replacement rate the additional cost per animal, per day over 24 months is £2.87, that’s £574 for those 10 heifers alone.

Achieving growth targets is the key. In the summer of 2016 our heifers atgrass achieved 0.64kg gain per day, in the summer of 2017, they achieved 0.84kg, slightly above our requirement of 0.82kg. In simple terms we should have weighed our heifers at grass! They were bang on target at most major points in their growth cycle but just because it’s a faff to take the weigh kit out to the field, it shouldn’t be an excuse, we needed to increase supplementation to compensate for the drop in grass quality in 2016.

Table 1

RVC/AHDB studies in 2009 & 2014

Calf to Calving also developed our interest in genomically testing our heifers as this was undertaken for the 10 heifers we were tracking. Since then, we now routinely test all heifer calves, after all it’s like having a CV for each heifer. We now part company with those under £275 PLI. This change will accelerate development of our herd which meets our milk contract requirements, fits our system and will rapidly increase our efficiency further.

Within our discussion group in 2015/16 we made 32% more profit per cow place than the next closest in our group, in 2016/17, this had risen to 50% without the help of an aligned contract payment.

People often ask us how many cows do you want to expand the herd to, the answer – I don’t know, I’ll tell you when we get there! We don’t need to be big to be successful, attention to detail, enthusiasm and learning from the best is key!