Farm Diary

It is maybe too early, and a severe setback could be coming our way, but we do know that it is now only around the corner, whatever happens.

We turned some dry cows out for the day while we mucked out the shed and they were certainly excited by that!

I am going to apply the first light dressing of fertiliser to the grass and attempt to repair the rabbit damage to the new grass ley while we have this window of opportunity.

We are getting stuck into cultivations at Tillington maize ground now that all the muck has been spread.

Muck is being hauled to the next block of maize ground at Hascombe, with plans to be cultivated there by the end of the month.

We should have plenty of muck to spread on the maize fields this spring, as we are installing a slurry separator as the first phase in meeting the new tough nitrogen vulnerable zone regulations, which will be announced by Defra soon.

Separating the solids will enable us to handle slurry much more easily and maximise the value it has to offer as a natural fertiliser.

We have halved our chemical fertiliser use over the past few years, as we apply slurry on to the grassland through our umbilical system (a mile of pipe with a pump on one end and a spreader bar on the other), making use of the nutrients to replace chemical fertiliser wherever possible.

The limitation of the system is the contamination of the grass after application during the growing period, where grazing or cutting follows any application resulting in rejection and contamination.

By separating the slurry, we will utilise the solids on the maize ground and the liquid can be applied to grassland throughout the year with no contamination of the sward.

Milk prices are still increasing slightly and markets look firm because Australia is still down on production and there is now a severe drought in New Zealand, with the highest temperatures in the Waikato area for more than 30 years.

Supply is still very tight in the UK and well below 2007 (and below the last three-year average) as we head into the end-of-the-quota year in March.

The proposed merger between Milklink and First Milk Co-ops has failed, which is a blow for the industry as a whole and especially the co-operative sector in this country.

Without the economy of scale afforded by such a merger, the UK processing sector falls further behind its European competitors, and if we can't get our act together in this country others will come here and do it for us.

There is a massive amount of work to do in the processing sector of the milk industry. A study over four years (paid for by Defra) by the Cardiff Business School suggests that 1.5bn is wasted each year in the dairy supply chain, most of which is to be found in the manufacturing sector of the processing industry.

There is a real danger that processing companies that claim to be competitive and doing well (as they did recently through Dairy UK), citing comparable or better returns than their European counterparts, believe this to be true. The missing vital information was the milk price!

Of course you can do well if you have consistently paid the lowest milk price in Europe for the past decade and more!

British dairy farmers have been paid between 1p and 1.5p per litre less than European farmers, and that extra penny or so would have made a massive difference through the recession of the past seven years.

Even with that huge advantage, we find that we cannot compete with the Irish. The Irish cheese processors cope with a massive spring peak in production, which gives a peak-to- trough (late summer) ratio of 7:1, whereas our own production in this country is much more level (at extra costs to dairy farmers as spring grass is the cheapest feed by far), and yet Irish cheese outcompetes our own despite the Irish farmers being paid more money per litre.

There is something that needs to be done in this area as a matter of urgency.

This feature was first published in the West Sussex Gazette on February 13 2008. To be first to see Farm Diary every week, buy the West Sussex Gazette every Wednesday.