Farmer Focus: Paying the price of variable maize maturity

The holiday period was challenging. The herd dropped 700 litres/day and scoured just before Christmas. I must own up and say it was entirely my fault.

I had just got through the first maize clamp and started on the next. This clamp, however, contained the greenest maize. It was the last 3ha (7 acres) we drilled, two weeks after the main lot on 2 June.

It was hardly mature enough at harvest, when everything else was a little over-ripe.

The scouring and reduced yield started a day after feeding this maize.

See also: Growing UK market for grain maize as trade tops £200/t

About the author

Tom Hildreth

Livestock Farmer Focus writer Tom Hildreth and family grow grass and maize for the 130-cow herd of genomically tested 11,000-litre Holsteins near York supplying Arla. The Hildreths run a café, ice cream business and milk vending machine on the farm.

Read more articles by Tom Hildreth

I immediately dropped half of the maize and rape meal in favour of straw and grass silage to try and get the rumens working again.

Only by slowly increasing maize and rape meal have I managed to slowly increase milk and reduce acidosis.

It wasn’t just the litres that took a hit. The last pregnancy check showed nothing in-calf that had been served over (or just before) this period of bad maize.

So, what could I have done differently? It seems obvious after the event that I should have introduced the new maize clamp slowly into the diet, and/or had the immature maize in a layer across the entire clamp instead of being at the top and front.

It just shows how delicate these cows are when they are performing as well as they do. It really doesn’t take much to upset them.

We have been trying not to upset them too much this week either, but they have had a bit of learning to do.

The robots were commissioned, and we are now feeding through them.

This hasn’t been too much of a struggle for the most part, as they have been used to (now decommissioned) out-of-parlour feeders, so walking into a stall for feed is not a new concept for them.

Two-thirds of them took to it a little too well, with some going through up to 30 times a day.

What’s more, they have been putting off the remaining third, who will only go through when guided.

We’ll see how we go on with them this week. The last milking through the parlour is tomorrow morning before we switch the robots onto milking.