Ian Pye works a 250 acre dairy farm near Preston which also grows crops for the autumn calving herd.
Old Holly is an open farm where the public can come and watch cows being milked, have a coffee in the tea room and buy an ice cream from the small farm shop. There's a strong focus on school visits. Ian is also a member of the NFU Next Generation Dairy Board.
Old Holly Update
Livestock -The cows returned to the pastures this month, albeit a few weeks later than normal due to the cold weather. For a few weeks this is extra work as cows only go out for a few hours at a time each day until the grass growth is enough to support them for longer. Grass growth is measured using a plate meter - this is basically a upside down umbrella that is pushed into the grass, the more the base moves the more grass you have, and the calculator on the handle works out a figure in kg/hectare of how much grass is on the field. The plate meter is most useful in making sure cows have eaten all they can from a field before they move on (cleaned their plate before leaving the table as it were), so some of the girls aren’t too happy with this as you can imagine, because grazing grass is hard work- if I find a broken plate meter I know one of them will have sabotaged it. When we open the gates for cows to go out some cows still stay inside, these are the smart ones as they know having feed brought to them is easier than going out and grazing it.
To meet their needs cows need to eat 60-80kg/day of fresh grass, whilst inside eating silage and concentrates they only need to eat 50kg/day. To make sure cows are doing this we have a wall chart that shows belly fill, (some places have a world cup wall chart, but we have a cow signals chart too) so we can judge that every cow is eating as much as she can and is happy, if the tummies look empty they come inside earlier and are given the option to eat some buffer (silage & grains) feed.
Cows tracks also have to be regularly cleaned off to stop small stones from becoming wedged in hooves. This wouldn’t normally be a problem, but in the sunshine the hens have turned the cow track into Blackpool beach, digging up the stone dust surface, flicking up stones and making potholes- we have thought about selling the hens buckets, spades, and ice creams, but instead we have dumped a load of stone dust in their paddocks so they can play on their own without bothering the dairy herd, at least they will have clean feathers and strong egg shells.
Crops - With the weather either being cold and very wet, or cold and very dry, crop growth has remained poor. Spring sown wheat on heavy land that was rolled to conserve moisture and reduce attack on the seed from slugs and birds looks very well considering the situation. Spring Wheat on lighter, better land that wasn’t rolled due to heavy cold rain is struggling, and like the grass fields needs some warm short sharp showers to get things going…. but we all know once it starts raining it probably won’t stop until September.
One of the wildlife areas we have sown has sainfoin mixed in with the seed- this is an experiment to see if the crop will actually grow on our farm. Sainfoin is a forage legume- i.e. it can be used for animal feed and provides nitrogen to any growing plants around it. The main interest for growing Sainfion is that it is reported to reduce the methane emissions from animals (such as cows) that eat it, when mixed in with other grass feed. We’d like to know if and how it will grow, so if any professor ever decides that it could actually help the environment by feeding to cows we know we can at least grow it in the first place.
As the farm is hosting its annual walk for Garstangs walking festival, and its also the International year of Biodiversity, it would be nice to walk out to the plot to see if it is growing, but its all in Nature’s hands now.
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