dairy talk

As I flew home from my nine weeks of individual Nuffield travel in New Zealand, China, Chile and North America, studying the topic of ‘Inspiring the next generation of dairy entrepreneurs', I found myself asking: 'What have I learned?'

I would like to start my first column by talking about what is going well, and what is not going so well, which is how we open things up at the robotics milking discussion group I am involved with

In my last column, I wrote about how we were embracing a zero-grazing system, which initially increased our milk yield but significantly added to our workload. Forget that! A few weeks later, yields dipped, grass quality was poor and we were fed up with the extra tractor work and scraping copious amounts of muck. Also, it eventually stopped raining

I have recently been helping to chair the British Grassland Society Summer walks across Dorset, Hampshire and Sussex. I cannot help but think that activities like this are just the tonic most farmers need

At long last we are enjoying some warm, dry weather here in Somerset. We have been lucky enough to grab some weather windows to do our first and second cuts on our Italian lays, and our first cut on everything else

Calving got under way without incident this year at Houghton Lodge and by the end of February we had successfully delivered over 60 per cent of our calvings

Well it's wet. I can only hope by the time you read this it's dry, or we're all in trouble

Let's start with the record-breaking news, although I'm not sure that knowing that February had the highest rainfall in 250 years is the sort of record we want to be hearing about

After many years of complaining about dry springs here in Sussex, I finally got my comeuppance this year, with March and April both delivering more than 100mm of rain.