As we finished calving in early May with a couple of cows holding on for as long as possible. We started breeding in the heifers on the 24th of April, we carried out a synchronisation after 7 days but carried on with visible heat detection and served all but one heifer that the bull served this one at a later date.

The cows started breeding on the 1st May, we used scratch cards on all the cows and carried out heat detection whilst milking in the parlour, we have decided to AI ourselves this year and with enough capable people within the team it will get the whole team involved.

We carried out an AI refresher course through Lic which was very benificial for all the team and myself, we found it got everyone thinking about breeding prior to the planned start of breeding and just got you back in correct mindeset for day one of breeding.

We have taken two cuts of silage, first cut from the milking platform and a week later the next cut from 85 acres we have that is not grazable by milking cows a few miles away, we have been very happy with crop size and quality from the first cut and the next cut we allowed it to bulk up more due to going into the clamp where our dry cows are housed, so potentially lesser quality crop but perfect for dry cows.

We applied 3000 gallons of dirty water across all silaged ground on the platform and applied 40kgs N of blend 24-0-14-7.5 on this area too. We continue to follow the cows with fertiliser but only 20 kgs due to us being on a quick round of <18 days.

Three groups of heifer calves ( 81) have been put to grass and been weaned but will continue to have cake at 1kg head. These calves are on some quality pasture that had been baled in April to give them some nice clean grass to go at.

We continue to AI the cows which is going well, we havent achieved the 90% submission rate in 21 days, but we are confident we aren’t seeing lots of short returns and as we complete week 4 we are not seeing lots and lots of return heats. We will continue to serve for a total of 12 weeks, 6 weeks AI and 6 weeks Hereford stock bulls in two teams of three on 24hr rotation. We will scan mid July to see what our 6 week ICR is.

Milk, the cows are doing around 27ltrs+ on average with some cows doing 40+ltrs, we are feeding the herd 2kgs of 14% cake within the parlour and grazing 3000 cover fields (which is still lush from rapid regrowth) so the residual are good. We aim to graze some of the silaged field and swap them back in the rotation and take out other paddocks for long term silage the aim is to take a cut of every paddock at least once per season.

In April we managed to spray off 12 ha and spread all our box muck on it a week later, we ploughed / rolled and power harrowed and finally power harrowed and drilled it with 15kgs of grass seed to the acre, the varieties we used were Aberchoice/Abergain/Aberzeus. The grass has taken well and germinated and we had 33mm of rain on it which was great.

I always find April and May disappears really quickly in our system we operate, so this year it was a special occassion, I turned 40 which somehow arrived very quickly in my eyes. Lucy was amazing in managing to sort out a surprise birthday party with so many friends and family there, which was amazing! Also some time away and a game of golf with family! My cousin and his wife bought me a pair of guinea foal, which was pay back for buying them a pair of pigs for their wedding present and putting them in there garden whilst they were away on honeymoon. We even managed to swing into Bletchley Park for a visit on the way home, which is an truly amazing place and it makes you appreciate what was done to win the war from these dedicated people.