Hillhead of Covington strategic farm launch

The launch included a farm tour and a detailed discussion of William’s current technical and financial performance compared against AHDB’s Optimal Systems KPIs.

The group also helped map out a long term vision for the farm, including a critical look at areas for improvement and future focus that included increasing milk production, improving herd health and creating more efficient systems.

Hillhead is the fifth dairy farm in the UK to join the strategic farm network and as such it will open its gates to other local farmers and demonstrate best practice, as well as making concerted efforts to improve efficiency through benchmarking key physical and financial performance data.

Host farmer William Baillie’s ultimate goals are to improve his business performance. Initial focus will be on two important areas; nutrition and genetics.

He says: “I’ve been benchmarking for over five years and I’ve always found it incredibly useful. Now as a strategic dairy farmer we’ll be benchmarking our performance against AHDB’s key performance indicators for all year round herds. Using that data we will be able to set targets and measure our progress to ensure we are among the best performing dairy farms.”

William bought Hillhead of Covington in 1996 and initially started off with 50 cows, he now has 310 pedigree Holsteins and is aiming to grow the herd to 400 cows. Housed all year the round the herd is milked three times a day and is fed a diet of mainly grass silage, whole crop and draff. For William the right diet is key to increasing yields.

“High quality silage makes all the difference to milk yield; you get out what you put in” he says. “We are currently reseeding a lot of the farm at the moment with a medium/late perennial grass to allow us to take five cuts of quality silage this season. We need to get good quality grass as we are growing less whole crop and draff is not easy to get hold of these days.”

Having started a mating programme three years ago William is now considering whether use of genomics would improve his breeding performance further.

“Genomics offers hard data on the traits the animal will have, rather than those they are likely to have, so I think using them could offer some significant improvements in terms of milk yield, health and lifespan.” William says.

For Paul Flanagan, AHDB Strategy Director for both Dairy and Scotland, the strategic dairy farm will offer Scottish dairy farmers the ideal opportunity to review their own practices.

He says: “Our Optimal Systems programme is not about telling farmers what calving system to use, but instead advising them to review their system and ensure it’s performing as efficiently as possible.

“We hope that William’s openness with his figures will get other Scottish farmers thinking about their own. For example, we want them to question their feed costs per litre of milk produced and age at first calving. If they aren’t in the ‘good performance’ bracket then they should be asking themselves why and we can help them figure out how they can get there.”