David's Dairy
The latest news from David's Dairy.
So what are we up to? What are all those diggers, dumper trucks (and right now the peck, peck, peckers) doing?
We’re building a whole new modern dairy unit including milking parlour, silage pit and slurry tower to be attached to an anaerobic digester. Putting the slurry through the anaerobic digester will not only improve its value as a fertilizer but also reduce its toxicity to invertebrates. And it will produce lots of electricity and hot water too!
A new cubicle shed will house up to 140 cows with calves, YES CALVES - we will be the first commercial dairy farm in the UK if not the world, to leave the dairy calves on their mothers until they are at least 9 months old. The cows will be milked once a day instead of twice. Our project will take 24 to 36 months to complete and this year’s spring born calves will be the first cows to be introduced to our new dairy system in 2012 / 2013.
We are doing this to tackle the challenges of animal welfare, climate change, and energy efficiency by producing as much food as possible from grass.
Watch this space for progress.
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At last - signs of summer. We're shearing the sheep and silaging - so not much time for blogging.
You may have noticed some debate in the press about large scale dairying - triggered by a proposal for an 8,000 cow herd in Lincolnshire. It is claimed that it will be the best in animal welfare and the lowest in greenhouse gas emissions. Well all that is debatable, but what is clear to me that 8000 cows not being able to get outside to graze the grass is just not natural.
See what happened when our cows first went out to grass this year after a long cold winter - anyone want to try to argue that they weren't looking forward to it?
