Tom King from Vortex Holsteins, Martinstown, Dorchester, Dorset runs a 120-hectare unit with his father Alan. Since 2000 the herd has more than doubled to its current 300 cows with 250-head of youngstock. Tom King is the fourth generation of the family at Church Farm.
As holder of the Gold Cup, Tom will be keeping a diary of events on farm and sharing it with other producers through regular articles in British Dairying. Here are a few extracts from his diary.
April
A new idea with lucerne this year - Tom will try out under-sowing lucerne in a spring cereal destined for wholecrop. Friends who farmed in Canada for a while said they got the best results from lucerne this way so Tom feels it's worth a go.
The whole Vortex herd has been TB tested recently and in calf heifers have had their vaccination boosters. Younger heifers have been freeze-branded and wormed prior to turnout.
The introduction of genomic indexes in the UK brings its excitement and Tom is pleased to see that the difference with the PLI rankings is not as dramatic as might have been anticipated. The King family is pleased to see their bull Vortex Downtown included in the top 25 in this latest proof run.
March
Expansion is on Tom King's mind this spring and the design of a new building. The number of options available and the need to get it right is proving a challenge.
Steelwork costs are pushing the Kings towards more support poles and smaller steels as opposed to a single span house. More support posts means careful design specification.
Tom is also taking on board recent work regarding the width of free stalls and increasing this to four feet has been shown to increase lying times and also milk yields per cow but this would give fewer cow spaces so a drop in total milk sold per year. Decisions, decisions!
He has seen two new loop designs recently specifically for sand beds and one of these will fit the bill. For cow handling, they are opting for locking head yokes - more expensive than a simple rail but they save a lot of time and create less stress for the cow.
February
Tom King considers himself far from traditional when it comes to specifying breeding goals and selecting sires. Five or six years ago he and his team moved away from sire selection based on production and/or type indexes and started selecting sires mainly on the new health, lifespan and fertility traits that were by now incorporated into PLI.
A few years ago and armed with the new ‘all inclusive' PLI, Tom ranked the sires he'd used and compared it with the longevity of daughters in his herd. It made interesting reading. Those bulls ranking best on the ‘new' PLI had produced daughters with staying power.
Carrying out the same exercise more recently and looking at heifers born just five years ago, Tom found that there was no progeny left in his herd that had been sired by bulls that were negative for the three health traits - lifespan, fertility and SCC. Nine out of 10 daughters sired by one of four bulls used at this time, that are now known as ‘health care ‘ specialists, are still in the herd.
This is enough evidence for Tom to be highly disciplined in his sire selection and select only bulls that are positive for all health traits. But these traits need more reliability behind them so only high reliability bulls are used in his herd.
And it's this reliability issue that concerns Tom with genomic sires - a sire with no daughters in milk or in its proof. He would like the breeding companies to be more up front about the risks this poses and how they can be best managed.
January
A new year and a focus on herd health targets for the Vortex herd. As cow numbers have increased Tom relies on tools like InterHerd where he can store and analyse data - in his view the single most important management practice.
Key areas for improvement are reducing retained foetal membranes (RFM) and cutting the number of mastitis cases. Milk fever has also been on the ‘hit' list.
Milk fever and RFM have been the reasons behind changes in dry cow management - to one group run on a simple straw base diet. But it has needed a lot of fine tuning and a complete analysis of all components of the dry cow diet to achieve more consistency and better intakes. At last improvements are being seen.
A dynamic test on the milking parlour and changing the setting of the milk flow meters, hand in hand with a review of the milking routine will hopefully bring some improvements to mastitis rates - last year the rate was 45 cases per 100 cows and Tom King feels there's a lot of scope for improvement.
