Major investment shows confidence in dairying’s future

Farmgate milk prices might be 4p to 5p below where they should be, but Maurice Jones is convinced there is a sound future for dairy farming.

While producers are still quitting the industry he certainly intends staying with it – believing before long buyers will have to pay realistic prices or go without supplies.

Confidence in that belief is being backed by plans to double up the family’s 1,000-cow milking operation with a £3 million plus green field site investment.

Subject to planning consent, the intention is to install a 72-point rotary parlour, a three-span 1,000 cow cubicle building, plus silage and slurry storage.

Stocking will be by organic growth, the result of having been locked up by TB restrictions for two years. Longer term, the unit could be linked to a slurry separator and anaerobic digester producing electricity.

Mr Jones accepts the financial commitment reflects considerable faith in the industry’s future but stresses, too, only the diversity of the somewhat unique family-run business makes it possible.

Calcourt is a long-established and well-known name in pedigree black and white circles - but is only the tip of the iceberg as far as farming operations go at its Montgomeryshire home.

The family – father Meurig, Maurice, and his son, Fraser – have developed a 2,500-acre business across seven different sites over a seven-mile triangle.

It involves 1,000 milkers plus followers, 800 breeding ewes, 2,500 bought-in and finished store lambs, 500 acres of cereals for home use, 200 acres of maize and up to 1,000 head a year of finished beef. Full-time employed staff runs to 20 and TB testing takes three teams of vets the best part of a week.

Milking herds

All but around 700 acres are owner-occupied and the mainstay is a 1,000-acre block around Court Calmore, near Montgomery, home to one of the three separately managed milking herds.

The expansion is planned for the herd based at Leighton, near Welshpool, an all year round calving operation averaging just over 10,000 litres per cow from twice a day milking.

Rations include grass and maize silage, moist maize grain, soya, rape, beet pulp, wheat and barley. No bought-in concentrates are fed either in or out of parlour. Each dairy unit has automatic slurry scrapers and top unloading grass tower silos.

“While some farms may have abandoned tower silos, they work well for us,” says Mr Jones. “They have been up for more than 30 years and basically are as good today as when they went in.”

The parlour at Leighton is an outdated 16-16 in need of replacement.

All the calves from the three dairy herds are reared on one unit up to calving age in the case of heifers and all Holstein bull calves are finished as entires on barley at 15 to 16 months

Mr Jones’s wife, Aisla, and his locally based veterinary surgeon daughter, Camilla, also run a high flying equestrian enterprise breeding and rearing show jumping, eventing and dressage horses.

“We are farming in an ideal area for dairying - but it is a sad reflection of the pressures the industry faces when so many producers are being forced out because of poor profitability,” says Mr Jones.

“As things stand at present milk prices are 4p to 5p per litre below the true market value.

“This is an issue the dairy companies need to address if they want a secure British milk supply.

“As a family unit we are fortunate in having a high degree of self-sufficiency and a diversity of enterprises - but other producers are not so fortunate.

“There are limits as to how tight you can pull in your belt and both large and small producers are still going out of business.”

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