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A team of eight Polish workers carry out milking, feeding, yard work and calf rearing.
the day shift running from five in the morning until five at night, which means they do the first and half of the second milking, with the night shift doing the second half of the second milking and the third milking. “It does mean, due to its size, that the parlour is running for about 18 hours a day, but that doesn’t worry me as I think its better to have the parlour working than sat idle for half the day.”
So much so that the family have as yet managed to avoid investing in a new parlour despite doubling herd size. “It is something we keep looking at and it will be done one day, but when you’re looking at potentially an investment of up to £1m it can take a bit of justifying. I don’t really want to put in a new parlour until I’ve fully decided where the business is heading and I’d want to see the new unit working as hard as the current one is.
“I don’t see a lot of point putting a new parlour in and then not using it heavily. It won’t reduce labour costs to only use it for half the day.”
The vision then is to push on to 900 cows in the next few years. “We’re on a Sainsbury contract at the moment, so we’re fairly secure, but there’s no guarantee for the future and we need to keep an open mind.” When it comes to breeding
Tom is a firm advocate of genomics, with the aim being to access the latest genetics as quickly as possible. “We select
Cows are given a 50 day voluntary waiting period before the first service.
bulls using our own index, with this weighted 70% to production and 30% to health. But the production element isn’t about yield, its tilted towards fat as we get paid on fat, with protein once its past 3% it doesn’t add anything to the bottom line. “We use Alta to source semen and construct the index and we don’t even consider Type when it comes to bull choice. We use up to five bulls at a time, with 85-90% of semen being genomic.
“I’d hope any bull thought worthy of semen collection was sufficiently good when it comes to Type. That said we do still classify as I feel it would be wasteful to throw away the knowledge and information built up on the herd over the last 40 years.”
Bulls which have left a lasting legacy at Vortex include Oman and a number of his sons, as well as Shottle, with current sires including Spring, Yura, Time and Stratify. We’re also using Flex and the Iota heifers coming in to the herd are really impressing me, so we’re using a bit more of him again too. His heifers are a fair step up from
most of the others, so we’ve gone back to him as he seems to suit our system.”
The family rear calves to 10-12 weeks before they head off to one of two rearers where they are taken through to a couple of weeks pre-calving. “The aim is to start serving heifers before 12 months old, with heifers picked out initially on size and then everything served once it hits 12 months.
“About two thirds of heifers are served to sexed semen, with the rest put to Aberdeen-Angus semen. They get two shots at AI and are then run with a homebred sweeper bull.” Tom says the challenge going forward will once again be having sufficient ground. “We currently run about 650 acres through a range of agreements, with 250 acres of that owned. “Further expansion will require more ground, both for growing crops, but also for spreading slurry. It’s something we’ll need to look at in conjunction with new buildings and a new parlour if we are to grow to where I’d like us to be,” he adds.
The dry cow ration is based on milled straw, maize silage, rapemeal and hypro molasses.
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