We’ll accept lower yields to get a better work-life balance
This week’s arrival of baby Conn, after all the impatient waiting an overdue birth brings, has set me thinking about valuing time and how we manage it.
For me, time is a commodity that has become increasingly precious over the past 10 years as our little family has expanded.
Those small hands that await your arrival to the house holding a size 22 hurley for a knock-around or eagerly pulling on a wet suit for a quick sea swim become the highlights of the day, and they underline the importance of creating a farm system that allows that to be enjoyed.
On our average-sized dairy farm, this entails making decisions throughout the year that cut out labour drains. Simply having a set end date to the breeding season is one of the biggest factors.
If cows have been bred this week, they won’t be calving down until the week of May 13 next year, which means breeding and calving at the same time. The breeding season requires huge focus, and when you are drawn away to bed a calving pen, train new calves to teat feed or manage colostrum cows while simultaneously tail-painting and heat detecting, there’s a lot of drain on your personal resources.
It’s very easy to leave the bulls in for an extra week or two at the end of the breeding season, but it does mean that next April or May those additional calving tasks are still cluttering your day.
Labour efficiency
The labour efficiency focus farms that Teagasc are monitoring this year offer an interesting benchmarker.
For the end of July, in labour terms these farms were averaging 54 minutes/cow with a huge range of 38-70 minutes/ cow. That difference across the group equates to 53 hours of labour over a week on an average 100-cow herd. That’s over a full labour unit in efficiency.
These farms have identified four areas that increase labour efficiency:
■ milking facilities, where the average number of rows in the parlour is eight;
■ grazing infrastructure to allow easier access to grazing paddocks at the shoulders of the year;