28-07-2025
- Business
- Western Telegraph
West Wales dairy farmer breeds his way to better business
Breeding is the cheapest and most effective way to make permanent, long-term improvements to a wide cross-section of traits in dairy cows.
Autumn milk producer Marcus Ferraro has historically only utilised milk recording to inform his drying off strategy but is now fully recording to build individual cow data and a herd genetic report.
This will help identify 'passenger cows' in his 300-cow herd at Sychpant Farm, near Newcastle Emlyn, and allow him to breed from his best animals.
Don't miss our next edition of Pembrokeshire Farmer, available free inside the Western Telegraph on July 30
During a recent AHDB strategic farm event at Sychpant Farm, farmers were told that Marcus was using breeding to transition the herd to a ProCross, a cow with a combination of Holstein, Montbeliarde and VikingRed genetics.
Farm business consultant Anna Bowen, of The Andersons Centre, said the business is achieving considerable year-on-year improvements, making a comparable farm profit (CFP) of 14.58 pence per litre (ppl) in the year ending March 2025 - up 15.45ppl on the previous 12 months.
This, she explained, had been helped by favourable market conditions but also by other actions, including more output per cow, up by an average of 837 litres/cow/year to 6,714, and an improvement in milk solids from 491kg/cow to 561kg.
Milk is supplied to cheesemaker, Leprino.
Making greater use of homegrown feed through actions such as measuring grass weekly and a greater focus on cow health, including through mobility scoring, had also reduced the farm's purchased feed and veterinary costs.
The Ferraros farm 182ha (450 acres), of which 61ha (150 acres) are owned and form the grazing platform.
Cows are wintered in sawdust-bedded cubicles and fed silage in central passageways but have access to pasture as soon as a pregnancy diagnosis confirms they are in calf.
'If it is dry and frosty they will be out in January to loaf and graze from February onwards,'' said Marcus, who farms with his wife, Vicki, and his father, Richard.
Going forward, they have invested in weigh scales to regularly monitor heifers to ensure growth rates are on track to breed and calve at 24 months in the 12-week calving block.
Despite improvements, Anna said there is further progress the business could make including the volume of milk produced from forage – currently 2,814 litres/cow/year.
Steps taken so far to achieve this include mapping out paddocks for grazing, upgrading silage clamps, and increasing feed space at winter housing.
Taking the guesswork out of genetics
Many milk producers openly admit that genetics is a topic they struggle to get to grips with.
AHDB genetics expert Victoria Ashmore said there are several actions farmers like Marcus can take to remove the guesswork from their breeding and management decisions, including genetically evaluating individual animals within the herd.
Using milk recording data in combination with the levy-funded AHDB Dairy Herd Genetic Report service will provide a genetic evaluation on individual animals.
The report will show where the herd's good genetics, and its weaknesses are, on traits like fertility or mastitis.
'The farm can then start to pinpoint more specifically their existing genetics and what they might need to do to improve these in the next generation,'' said Victoria.
Sexed semen can simplify the route to genetic progress.
Wider use of sexed semen means that dairy farms need to breed fewer animals to dairy sires to produce the required number of herd replacements.
They can then be more specific on which cows they want to breed their next generation of milking cows from.
'This is where we really start to drill down into individual animals and rank the herd based firstly on the overall profit index but also the traits of interest so the next generation is being bred from the superior animals in the herd,'' Victoria explained.
Genomics allow a broader genetic identification for each animal.
Dairy farmers don't need to wait until a heifer calves and starts milking to establish her genetic merit as taking a DNA sample from her as a young animal will provide that.
Using this information, certain heifers can be selected to breed future replacements that match a farm's own strategy.
Breeding the best females will increase the genetic value of replacements and, as a consequence, fewer animals with a lower genetic merit will come into the herd.
