Sustainable and profitable dairying (Carrutherstown) – event summary

The meeting was based on Hardgrove Farm at Dumfries and was delivered by a range of staff covering 4 main topics which are essential to ensure that dairy farming is profitable and sustainable.

Attendees were primarily dairy farmers from the South West of Scotland. The four main topics covered were:

• Cross Compliance
• Basics of Benchmarking in a dairy herd and what are the main Key Performance Indicators,
• Replacement Nutrition, focusing on the feeding of colostrum and rearing of dairy heifers to allow them to calve down at 2 years old
• Calf Health, where the vets focused on the safe storage and feeding of colostrum and the use of antibiotics

All the stations were very interactive and informal to allow questions to be asked throughout generating good discussions on best practice.
The day was well received with many farmers highlighting that there were going to starting measuring birth weights and benchmarking current performance to allow easier comparison of changes made.

Handouts from the day are below.