early riser
Member
- Location
- Up North
We’ve been on the 360 for nearly 3years, and honestly thinking of abandoning it. Getting sick of having to meet targets based on percentages and averages, be it age at first calving, cow or calf mortality, bactoscan etc with no tolerance for pure bad luck or an understanding of how averages work and how you reach an average!
We’ve had a recent run of bad luck with calvings, and on a sub 100 cow herd you soon rack up the mortality %age into the non conformance box. It’s seems wrong that when I pull or find a dead calf which is bad enough… my first thought is FFS arla are going to be at me for this
My latest rant is at Map of Ag… we’re required to send a photo of mobility scoring sheet, but we’ve also to fill in the boxes with the details from the because they can’t be arsed to open the attached photo and get the info themselves
The 360 requirements now are miles away from what we signed up to 3 yrs ago with no ‘cost compensation’ the extra work involved and they always throw more at us to do. Yes it maybe seems a small extra bit of form filling at the time, but it all adds up to taking more time than you realise.
New this month is everyone has to take a 3hr online Human Resources Training course with a test to pass afterwards. As a family farm we don’t employ anyone, so why would we do that?
Since we joined, the extra work from the initial form filling includes
Entering extra Monthly records for
Milk fever cases
Held placentas
LDA’s
Downer cows
Dairy feed usage
Dairy blend
Rearer feed
Weaning feed
Milk replacer
6 way breakdown of calf medical treatments
Cull cow declaration
We also have to submit proof of johnes, bvd testing etc
Gone from Annual to quarterly mobility scoring
gone from Johnes 30 cow screen to whole herd testing.
now we have this Human Resources course to contend with.
And don’t get me started on all the medicines we can’t use….
Where do I sign…..
What is the cull cow declaration please?