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South Eastern
27/01/2020 21:30:00
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South East AGM

The Club AGM was held at the Old Dairy, Pitchfont Farm, by kind permission of Bill and Di Peters. President David Heaseman chaired the meeting and after business was concluded we were delighted to welcome our guest speaker, Mr Steven Cox from the Sevenacre herd.

Steven became involved in the business at the age of 15 with his father in 1968. The herd consisted of seven milking cows. There were also three in-calf heifers one of which went on to have 14 lactations; the family (Maggie) is still represented in the herd today, with one member being an EX 96-point cow.

The herd was soon moved to its present holding, when 130 Acre Farm was purchased. It had a tie stall milking byre until 1973 when cow kennels were introduced along with a 5/10 herringbone parlour. By 1978 a hundred cows were being milked and a further 80 acres backing on to the holding were purchased. 

Land continued to be purchased as it became available around the main holding till today there is 730 acres owned and 170 acres rented and 570 cows milked three times a day. A rotary parlour was put in 2009 when Andrew’s son and daughter came home from various college courses to join the family business.

The herd average today is 12,000 litres sold per cow 3.98%BF, 3.30%P, 405-day calving index, 114 cells and very impressive figures of 4,000litres from forage – and feed cost per litre of seven pence. All replacements are home-reared, 50% of the herd is put to beef and the rest to sexed semen. Heifers calve in at 21-24 months and are inseminated to sexed semen twice before the Angus bull is introduced. 

Andrew’s philosophy on cow management is to keep things simple. There are seven full-time staff plus night milkers. All the field work is done in-house apart from the maize drilling.

Andrew still has many original cow families in the herd which were graded up including the Daisies, Maggies, Mermaids and Duchesses and although he has introduced some more fancy families, he feels the originals out-perform them. 

Bulls such as Linmack, Kilton Marksmin, Etazon Celsius and Shottle have left many great progeny in the past, but now genomic bulls are used. Andrew believes that today the gene pool used is too small to select bulls and that some families with great longevity and big production are being overlooked. This year 90 cows have been classified Excellent with many others VG.

This was an excellent presentation by Andrew who filled his talk with much humour. 

Andrew then awarded the herd competition cups and presented Bill and Di Peters with richly-deserved 2019 Club Awards.

Our next club meeting will be 23rd March 2020 where Max Davis will be giving us a talk on his Davlea herd.

Mike Carr