3 minute read
Autumn calving
Making the switch
The 390 cows on the Booth’s farm are producing slightly more milk in the autumn calving system.
By Cheyenne Nicholson
A Northland farmer reckons making the switch to autumn calving has been the perfect choice for the farm.
When it came to switching his Northland farm to autumn calving, Andrew Booth admits his approach was a bit different to most. In their 12th season on the farm and third as 50:50 sharemilkers in Whangarei, Andrew and his wife Vicky started the switch to autumn calving four years ago.
“Summers on this farm are very dry, but we can maintain good growth over winter. Autumn calving lets us utilise that good growth with milking cows rather than dry cows, so it better suits our farms’ capabilities,” he says.
The System 3, 390-cow farm utilises maize and silage grown on and off-farm, along with some palm kernel to fill the gaps where needed, but since switching to autumn calving their reliance on supplementary feed had gone down slightly.
Historically the farm typically calved on July 1 and relied heavily on supplementary feed throughout the summer. After helping on his sister’s farm, which is full autumn calving, he immediately saw the benefits and how it could work on his farm.
“We started to plan how we could make it work here. Because of our summers, extended lactation as a method of transition to autumn calving wasn’t an option. We also knew we wouldn’t be able to calve as early as some farms, because we can stay dry for quite a long time. With that in mind, we aimed for mid-April calving, which was bringing forward calving by 2.5 months,” he explains.
“We started gradually bringing the calving date forward by minimising the tail end of calving. We had the ability to cull late calvers, and the fact we had a tight calving pattern to begin with really helped with this. We also started bringing the start of mating forward bit by bit. It took four years to shift the start of calving from July 1 to April 13.”
The first year of transition, rather than starting mating earlier and mating while still calving, they opted for a shorter mating window of less than his usual 12 weeks.
“That first year, we had two weeks of calving to go when we started mating. I still did pre-mating and didn’t change our practices at all, other than using some short gestation dairy semen to help tighten up the tail a bit,” he says.
For the most part, empty rates hovered around the usual 8-12%, except for their second year of transition, when they had to use all AB due to the bulls not being up to scratch, and it blew out to 16%. Once-a-day (OAD) was utilised for noncycling cows and was used again last year to combat some lameness issues.
“It was a very wet and horrible start to mating, which we kick-off on July 4. I had lots of lameness issues, so the whole herd went onto OAD, which worked a treat. We lost a bit of milk production, but I’d rather that than unhappy cows. And a poor repro result,” he says.
Because of the lengthy transition approach they took, milk production didn’t take a hit and the farms overall efficiency has improved, with cows producing on average 0.5kg mls above what they did before the switch.
“It’s been surprising the benefits that
