Farmer focus: greenfield dairy site progressing well - farmers weekly

© John Eveson The last month has been quite frankly insane with the speed at which progress is being made on the dairy development. The parlour shed is up, we have dug out for the rotary and

the underpass is in. The footings for the cubicle shed have all been poured and the shed will be erected soon. We couldn’t have found a better site for the buildings regarding the available

resources under the sod. We have been breaking a substantial tonnage of rock out of one side of where the cubicle building is to be situated, all of which has been perfect for levelling the

site and hardening any softer spots in the ground. We now have only five ewes left to lamb. It has been a great spring for lambing outside, with barely a wet day, and the early spring has

provided us with ample grass for the ewes. We are just in the process of tagging and tailing everything. SEE ALSO: 4 tips on improving your lifetime daily yield in dairy herds The lambs look

well with plenty about. I have to admit I haven’t done much, if any, lambing this time. Most of my time has been spent on the building project or in the office organising stuff for it, so

credit to my mum for doing a great job with them. The cows are still motoring at around the 36-litre mark. Butterfat has dropped a little but we are just about to run out of wholecrop, so a

diet change is imminent and, hopefully, we can alter things to remedy this and hold production. First-cut silage was finished by close of play on the 30 April this year. There was plenty of

it and the quality looks good, but we will see how it analyses. Following silage, we have applied fertiliser and slurry using a dribble bar to reduce the covering of the leaf because we want

to cut five weeks later on the 2 June roughly.