Farmer Focus: Good and bad of farming social media
Jonathan Hughes © Tim Scrivener Over the past few weeks we’ve seen the positive impact and negative impact of social media within agriculture.
First, a positive impact gathering people together from across Britain to demonstrate peacefully at Westminster. Furthermore, assembling a huge food bank was a great display for British agriculture.
On a more negative note, the spreading of misinformation on Bovaer – the methane inhibitor – has been colossal, even among the farming community (I thought many would have read the science before clicking-to-share).
See also: Opinion: Social media – lots to love and hate
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It’s important to remember that Arla is a farmer-owned co-operative, which is striving for the best animal welfare, along with low carbon footprint and high sustainability standards.
It also pays a market-leading milk price in return for a high-quality product.
Obviously, because of its inorganic characteristics, the inhibitor won’t be fed to organic cows, and, from our understanding, it has little effect on pasture-based diets.
However, if farmers make tweaks to reduce methane emissions and add value, thus improving profitability, then it becomes a small adjustment worth making.
We’ve had a strong start to breeding. The R2 heifers are approaching their third week of breeding and cows are just finishing week two at the time of writing.
With most services to sexed semen, we’re serving twice a day to optimise timings. We’re using an artificial insemination (AI) technician in the morning for the first three weeks.
Afternoon AI is being completed in-house. The team is enjoying being responsible for this.
For a few years we have carried a smaller spring block, but this is the first full season where we’ve been autumn-only.
The peak workload has been higher this calving time; however, processes felt more streamlined with everything happening at once.
As a result, management decisions seem easier, and we put more focus on certain tasks with the team. This has allowed the attention to detail needed and I think we’ve seen performance benefit as a result.
Production has been good this season, yielding just over 30 litres at 2.5kg milk solids a head/day, which we are pleased with.
The herd transitioned well, considering a relatively wet calving season on standing hay, so hopefully fertility results will show this.
We aim to get a six-week in-calf rate above 75% and cut the calving period from 12 to 10 weeks.