Herd calving pattern
Herd calving pattern
To increase milk from grass and minimise our production costs in future, a management decision has been taken to move the calving pattern towards the winter/spring period. Cows will start to calve in November and run to March. The average calving date of the herd will be January. Why not calve later still as the grass starts to grow? There were two main reasons for the change in calving pattern:
- To avoid having to push milk from forage with freshly calved cows grazing autumn grass.
- To have cows at an earlier stage of the lactation in spring making better use of the potential production from grass.
An additional reason is that the herd is also managed for teaching purposes and calving cows exclusively in spring would limit the use of the herd to teach the basic skills of milking and milk production.
