Farm of the Week: The weather proved a pain in the grass

IT WAS not the best time for Chris Stockdale to have 160 guests wanting to look at his grass.

They assembled at Carr House Farm, Allerston, near Pickering, as he was clocking up eight weeks without rain. And that was after “the severest winter for 50 years”, he reminded them.

One of his winter problems was a commitment to housing sheep. By the time they had dug through the snow, he said, “everywhere they found grass they absolutely hammered it”. He spent £1,000 on seed to repair the damage but “might as well have chucked it down the drain”, thanks to the early spring drought.

A lot of the high-yield grass he planted last autumn, for silage, was looking pretty sorry, too, because of ‘winter kill’ and he was wishing he had got it all started in August. His veteran seedsman, Colin Johnson of Armstrong Richardson at Stokesley, added that his conclusion from the winter was that it was probably time to move away from Italian ryes in favour of more of the ever-improving hybrids coming out of Holland, Denmark and France.

This might not be a good year for proving the argument everybody had been invited to hear.

Mr Stockdale was host to a farm walk organised by the Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers and the British Grassland Society to push the message that grass is one answer to the challenge of survival in dairy. They chose Carr House Farm to make the point that you do not have to be low-input low-output to think so.

Mr Stockdale was not giving away figures but over the past four years, he has invested big-time. Like many, he had got to the point where he had to up his stake or get out of the game. Milkings in the old parlour were taking three and a half hours. If he wanted a new one he needed more volume and if he got more stock, he needed new buildings – and a new shed nowadays requires 10 square metres per cow.

But the Stockdale family had 60 years invested in their pedigree Holstein Friesian herd – starting with 10 cows Chris Stockdale’s father and grandfather brought with them to the farm in 1953.

They have built several businesses there since, including the Vale of Pickering Caravan Site, run by Mr Stockdale’s wife Dianne; Stockdale Construction, run by his brother John; and Stockdale Eggs, run by his dad, Tony.

Chris, 48, runs the dairy farm, with two full-time hands. He has 193 acres for forage, including 60 for high-yield short leys, rotating with 30 acres of maize, 70 of winter barley and 97 of wheat, which provide some feed and some spare wheat for sale.

He came up with the necessary to scale up from 100 to 155 milking cows and is aiming for 170. Followers are mainly boarded out from 12 weeks until calving. For the past five years he has taken breeding advice and semen from Worldwide Sires, looking to move to a rounder, stronger, longer-lived and more grass-friendly Holstein profile, and is pleased with the results.

The intention is to repay all the investment over 7-10 years – which will be a tight business if prices do not go up. Since he did the sums, his pay from Arla has gone up from 25p to 27p a litre but that was inputs-related and he is depending on more. Meanwhile, efficiencies are being pursued all round – not least in animal health and fertility. The farm is spending more than 1p a litre on vet services, including vaccinations against BVD, IBR and Rotavirus. His chosen system of loose housing on straw was giving his herd better feet and legs, said Mr Stockdale, but at a cost in mastitis, which he has to work on.

A big element in the calculations that said it was all possible was the farm’s improving record in living off its own resources. The cows have had their rolling average up to more than 9,500 litres with nearly 3,400 coming from forage and he is out to improve on both figures.

It was the importance of grass in a high-productivity Holstein-based operation which brought interested farmers to the open day from as far as Ayrshire, Somerset and Swansea.

Mr Stockdale paid tribute to the lessons learned through his local grassland group. It had led him away from strip-grazing to a less intensive paddock system and taught him the importance of being able to move cattle around in all conditions. He invested in tracks made from railway sleepers and a good water network.

One of his mentors, Paul Robinson, who wears hats for feed merchant Thompsons of York, dairy consultants Kingshay and the Grassland Society, stressed the importance of getting cows out early to get the full benefits of grass. Grazing costs 60 per cent of silage, he said. A cow on early grass could get a kilo of dry matter an hour from six cms of grass growth and four litres of milk from it. He was amazed it had gone out of fashion.

Mr Stockdale uses a fair amount of nitrogen on his pastures. Even so, Mr Robinson reckoned the cost of dry matter from grazing to be £50 a tonne, compared with £70 for silage, £63 for maize and £81 for wheat.

Mr Stockdale said his low-to-middle yielders had gone out on April 6 this year. The timing was, he said, a matter of when you could pluck up the nerve to risk a production drop. This did happen with grassland feeding in a high-productivity system – “it’s a very fine line and you have to be adjusting all the time”.

A surprisingly small number of the audience put their hands up to ownership of a “plate meter”, the gadget which measures pasture content. Mr Stockdale confessed he had not got one himself yet. Mr Robinson said he liked “the precision” of a meter but some farmers managed with a beer can – if it was hid standing up, it was time to put the cattle in; if it was visible on its side, it was time to take them out.

Mr Stockdale said not everything he learned from his grassland group was right. He had been persuaded, for example, not to bother reseeding as a matter of course.

“Now, looking at my winter kills and weed infestations, I am making my mind up that was a mistake,” he said. “You can’t beat new leys.”

The BGS was keen to promote its mentoring scheme, subsidised by Eblex and DairyCo, which makes an experienced grassland manager available for up to eight hours as one of the benefits of the £50 joining fee.

Sheep farmer Stuart Stark, renowned for his progressive methods at Sutton in the Forest, north of York, is one Yorkshire mentor. Dairy man Malcolm Fewster, of Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, is another.

Call Sara Gregson, manager of BGS Grazing Partners, on 01799 530934.