Read & Son, Willow Farm
Willow Farm is a 325 acre dairy farming business located in South Norfolk. The dairy herd comprises 176 Holstein Friesians yielding on average 10,000 litres (milk sold per cow). Milk is marketed to Asda, via the Arla Foods Milk Partnership.
The unit is managed on a daily basis by Jimmy Mills, with herdsman Andrew Bolderstone, and father in law, Jack Read. Cows are housed in cubicles and fed a TMR with an in-parlour top up of concentrates.
As part of the Asda Dairy Link Project, Jimmy and the team regularly attend on-farm workshops and technical meetings with other local Asda producers, to help improve physical and financial performance at farm level.
The first part of the project involved recording aspects of animal health and reasons for culling, using Kite’s Health and Culling Monitor Service. This gives the farm targets and benchmarks to check that things are progressing in the right direction.
One of the meetings covered herd fertility management, and from that meeting the farm went onto install Heat-Time, the heat detection system, as with high yielding cows, the main issue is spotting them bulling. As a result the herd is progressing well as the results below show:
Kite Milk Monitor Rolling Results 2007 - 2008
| Parameter |
Mar '07 |
Mar '08 |
Aug '09 |
| Herd size |
166 |
178 |
178 |
| Yield per cow |
9,539 |
9,856 |
10,037 |
| Butterfat |
4.10% |
4.11% |
4.07% |
| Protein |
3.14% |
3.19% |
3.17% |
| SCC |
221 |
236 |
218 |
| Bactoscan |
13 |
15 |
15 |
Farmer comment:
“I like the ASDA meetings, they are very useful, it is good to share issues and ideas. We can be open and honest with each other and focus on the problems that we would not tackle and focus on otherwise, particularly Health and Culling Monitor and herd health in general. There is no other forum like this.”
Jimmy Mills, Read & Son