In your mailing:
Kingshay Dairy Costings Focus Report 2024
Kingshay are pleased to publish our Dairy Costings Focus Report for 2024, which includes analyses of herd performance, health costs and margin over purchased feed data ranked by a variety of different factors, such as production system and region, from herds using our Dairy Costings service.
The thirteenth annual report also includes milk price and feed cost trends up to March 2024, along with the usual analysis of herd data from Organic, Channel Island and Crossbred herds. Additional trends from our Health Manager service are discussed, including fertility trends and cow leaving reasons.
Achieving Milk from Forage Part 2: Grazing Management and Infrastructure Dairy Insight
This is the third publication in our ‘Achieving Milk from Forage Series’. It is designed in a workbook format, so that it can be used as a quick guide to highlight any opportunities for change to increase your milk from forage.
It looks at how it is not essential to change system completely to increase your milk from grazing and how changing one thing could increase your net profit.
Are you making the most of your Kingshay Membership?
Dairy Costings are available FREE of charge* as part of your Dairy Insight package. Worth over £325 a year! This includes a Feed and Forage Report providing comprehensive analysis of Feed & Forage Utilisation and Costs over the last 12 months, including an estimate of grazing intakes.
Use this to track your herd's milk from forage performance and make informed decisions to improve your profitability.
*Regular package for one herd – additional herds can be added at a discounted rate.
The UK Hoof Health Registry
Farmers are collecting data on which cows have, and do not have, hoof lesions. Using this, a team at the University of Liverpool are working to evaluate the genetic susceptibility of dairy cattle to lameness causing lesions. This data can be utilised as part of a national database (reviewed at a regular basis with continual data input) which can inform future genetic evaluations, research and best practice implementation.
They anticipate that this data will help AHDB develop the “Lameness Advantage Index” to be much more potent, meaning that farmers will be able to select for more genetically robust cows, but to do that, we need farmers, foot trimmers, and vets support. What we are asking for, is access to farmers hoof lesion data to feed back to the EGENES project to further develop our genetic evaluations for lameness. If you (or your hoof trimmer) are recording using ALL4FEET, Uniform Agri, DairyComp, or VetIMPRESS then you are able to support this project.
By sharing hoof health records, and access to milk recording data (for cow identification/genetic mapping), we will work to strengthen the capacity of the breeding indexes for the benefit of farmers UK wide. This project only involves the signing of a consent form from the farmers, it doesn't involve invasive farm visits or change to hoof health protocols. It is important to note that we won't be using these records for welfare quality assessment and will be handled with the utmost confidence (as udder health and milk quality metrics are handled, by other organisations).
If you would like to take part, please follow the link to the consent form -https://forms.office.com/e/ctu1Uiy8Gk
Also enclosed in your Mailing – The Latest Insights into Dairy Cow Mobility: This publication shares the results from an industry wide survey into cow mobility.
Stride are hosting a series of workshops around the country to share the latest thinking on cost-effective reduction of foot health issues and compromised mobility.
Analysing your grass before cutting for silage is cheap and easy to do. This is a good way to ensure you have the facts, so that you can cut at the right time to help prevent silage quality and cow performance becoming an issue next winter.
Putting slurry on your aftermath? The nutrient value for Organic manures will vary significantly depending on where the manure comes from as well as how it is stored and handled.
It's not a case of always going by the book (RB209)… find out the real value of your slurry or manure. Regularly analysing your organic manures just before application can save you money on bagged fertiliser.
Visit www. kingshay.com/shop/product/category/sampling-measuring/ for our full range of analysis.
