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A recent purchase in America was a Shottle daughter out of Apple herself which should give some exciting progeny
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about getting ourselves organised to bring the cows here and get going. “One of the first things we had to sort was finding a home for our milk. We were lucky to get a contract with a local bottling plant which offered us a significant premium price on the condition we could deliver the milk ourselves. It was a great start as the bottler was relatively relaxed about the volume we could supply which varied day by day and week by week.
“We stayed with that contract until last summer when we switched to Dairy Crest and are grateful for the start it gave us,” says Mark. “We started talking to the land agent in early August 2008 and milked our first cows at Grange Dairy on 28 September the same year. In the meantime we’d taken a small loan from an aunt and uncle, on the condition it was repaid within 12 months, and got together the basic machinery we needed and paid the outgoing tenant the necessary ingoings for the silage in the clamp and the growing crops.”
Mark says he was also lucky to have made contacts with a number of feed and other suppliers over the years and
TOP Lee Fortune Elsie EX90 is the best cow in the herd, a sister to Snowman and is the first cow at Crystalclear to produce 70kg a day.
ABOVE Mark has made many contacts during his career as an auctioneer that have helped him build up his business on the farm.
LEFT Ven Dairy Lea a VG87 scored Planet daughter out of an EX Shottle daughter of Lylehaven Lila Z, she is in- calf to Equation and has pregnancies by Saviour.
34 THE JOURNAL APRIL 2015
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