Fermanagh dairy farmers have been touring farms throughout southern Ireland where they saw good grassland management. The study tour was organised by the local CAFRE Dairying Development Adviser, Alan Warnock.

The group of 27 dairy farmers visiited four farm units; the farm of Philip Donohoe at Kilnaleck, Co Cavan who runs a pedigree herd of 140 winter calving Holstein cows; the Teagasc Dairy Research Farm At Johnstown Castle, Co Wexford which is carrying out trials with both spring calving and autumn calving cows; the farm of Gordon Hemmingway at Enniscorthy, Co Wexford where Gordon manages a spring calving herd of 130 black and white cows and the farm of Christian von Teichman at Ashford, Co Wicklow who is milking 100 Holstein Friesian cows through two robots on an A/B grazing system.

Grassland Management - Good grassland management was a strong feature on all the farms visited. It is enabling the farmers to achieve excellent performance from their dairy herds with minimum concentrate usage and good cost control. Fields are soil sampled on a regular basis to ensure optimum levels of pH, phosphate and potash and reseeding is carried out to increase the productivity of under-performing grass swards. While the Fermanagh dairy farmers were envious of the free draining soils and lower rainfall on these farms they also recognised that a similar approach to maximise the production and utilisation of grass is required on their farms despite the constraints of heavy soils and higher rainfall.

Breeding - The Fermanagh farmers were impressed with the type and performance of the cows and heifers on the farms visited and their suitability for a grazing system of milk production. The Economic Breeding Index (EBI) is being used on all the farms to select AI sires for producing replacement heifers. It has proved to be a very reliable system of ranking AI sires for milk yield, milk compositional quality and fertility and is equally successful for higher yielding autumn calving herds as well as spring calving.

Robotic milking - In NI robotic milking is associated with dairy herds which are totally confined. There was much interest in seeing a grass based system of milk production using robotic milking on the farm of Christian von Teichman. The cows are grazed on an A/B paddock system with unrestricted access to the parlour yard. They are allocated grass for 12 hours and must pass through the parlour yard to access fresh grazing. There is only one entrance/exit point to the parlour yard with electronic identification. Cows that are due to be milked cannot exit until they have gone through the robot. Most of the roadways have been reorganised to provide in and out routes between paddocks and parlour yard.

Christian said that he was using some of the time freed up by not having to milk his cows to improving his grazing management. Last month his herd had an average milk yield of 24 litres/cow with 3.47% protein and 4.15% butterfat from an average concentrate usage of only 2kg/head/day.