Farmer Focus: R D Horton & Son, Wiltshire
The Hinton Herd of pedigree Holsteins was founded in 1967 when Robert imported ten heifers and two bulls from Canada. The milking herd of 350 now includes 67 Excellent and 150 VG and has nine over 100 Tonne cows in the herd. Robert’s two sons, Tom and James, are now both involved in the business based across two farms in Broad Hinton in Wiltshire.
The herd are cubicle housed on recycled sand, with dry cows and in calf heifers going out to grass when possible. The farm grows a mix of Rye Grass, Maize, Wheat, Barley and OSR and have acreage of permanent grassland.
Since 2019 they have milked the herd three times a day through the 40:40 herringbone parlour. The milking system works well for them as they are fortunate to have a good team of staff to carry out the duties. Working closely with CIS Area Manager Karen Reeve they have a milk recorder visit monthly to take their samples. The herd is currently averaging 13,914KG, Butter Fat 3.97%, Protein 3.16% and a calving interval of 391.
Checking for high cell counts is one of the main benefits of the monthly milk recording as it enables the team to identify any problems that can be caught early. It is also useful for double checking any animals that have been treated in the past and to check up on their current health status.
Insight is key on a daily basis when managing individual cows and overall herd performance therefore Tom refers to YourHerd in the office and MobileHerd when he is in the yard looking at data from milk recording. The cell count list, youngstock list and Johnes report are the three that are referred to most. They also look at trends and can benchmark against a number of variables to help the management of the all year round calving herd.
The family breed all their own replacements using roughly 50:50 sexed semen on the herd and sells on any surplus. The bottom end of the herd is served to Angus or Belgian Blue. All pedigree heifers are genomically tested through CIS with the results being used to select the heifers they keep in the herd.
The Hortons reap the benefits of the Holstein Complete package that CIS offers as this provides monthly milk recording, all female pedigree registrations and two type classification visits per year for a set monthly fee. Classifying the herd is a useful tool as it enables Robert, Tom and James to stand back and look at each individual dam which provides useful information to make future decisions. It is also interesting to see how individual bulls that have been used are performing.
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