Dairy cake rejection

Salt'n'Pepper

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Scotland
Hi,we have just received a load of dairy cake which about 1/4 of our cows are rejecting in the parlour.
It is supposed to be the same as we have been using all summer.
Has anyone else been having similar problems,or are we just unlucky with a batch of cake?
 

Bald Rick

Moderator
Livestock Farmer
Location
Anglesey
They’re not gonna keep sending a £250 cake that’s costing them £350 to make.

That's my point.
Even if you are on fixed formulation, the mills will either call "Force Majeure" and renege on the price or use cheap fillers like husks to keep the cost within their profit parameters

There is only ever one loser ............ and no prizes for guess which one it is
 

Bald Rick

Moderator
Livestock Farmer
Location
Anglesey
If it isn't from someone with a fixed formulation stop buying it and start buying fixed formulation cake.

Changing ingredients to suit themselves is a top way to get cows rejecting stuff. Get the supplying company to suck out the old cake.

Which is fine until the mill realises that it cannot make the cake for the contracted price. Only farmers are in the business of losing money due to being price takers so as I have said, mill will either put in filler or call Force Majeure and increase the contracted price.

TBH it's damn difficult to get a price on anything at the moment as everything seems to be POA
 
Which is fine until the mill realises that it cannot make the cake for the contracted price. Only farmers are in the business of losing money due to being price takers so as I have said, mill will either put in filler or call Force Majeure and increase the contracted price.

TBH it's damn difficult to get a price on anything at the moment as everything seems to be POA

If they can't make the cake for the contracted price, that is their own problem though. You are undoubtedly a pretty big customer in terms of tonnes. The mills all have the same access to the same raw materials, prices and ports that I did. They aren't top secret. If you wanted to book your entire tonnage for next summer, the mills can find the price of the raw materials going forward between May and September next year, calculate the price and then just buy the required materials on contract. By way of explanation it never mattered to me if the price of say rapemeal was £180/t or £300/t- the margin remained the same on the finished product.

Force Majeure is a big hammer and should only really be used for genuine reasons- mill burned down, product totally unavailable due to natural disaster in the supply country etc. In that case, I would expect any company worth their salt who valued their relationship with you would have a grown up conversation and find some way that altered the formulation to suit the situation. I remember having this exact conversation with a customer because the supply of maize gluten had dried up so he wanted to switch to something else.
 

frederick

Member
Location
south west
If they can't make the cake for the contracted price, that is their own problem though. You are undoubtedly a pretty big customer in terms of tonnes. The mills all have the same access to the same raw materials, prices and ports that I did. They aren't top secret. If you wanted to book your entire tonnage for next summer, the mills can find the price of the raw materials going forward between May and September next year, calculate the price and then just buy the required materials on contract. By way of explanation it never mattered to me if the price of say rapemeal was £180/t or £300/t- the margin remained the same on the finished product.

Force Majeure is a big hammer and should only really be used for genuine reasons- mill burned down, product totally unavailable due to natural disaster in the supply country etc. In that case, I would expect any company worth their salt who valued their relationship with you would have a grown up conversation and find some way that altered the formulation to suit the situation. I remember having this exact conversation with a customer because the supply of maize gluten had dried up so he wanted to switch to something else.
The electric companies are going bust because they have to sell at leas than they are buying.
You can hold the feed company to contract and they will go under. You will then be on the open market and it will cost a fortune.

It's just best if there is an open discussion rather than one sided decisions.
 
Location
Cheshire
The electric companies are going bust because they have to sell at leas than they are buying.
You can hold the feed company to contract and they will go under. You will then be on the open market and it will cost a fortune.

It's just best if there is an open discussion rather than one sided decisions.
The ones that are going bust didn't hedge their sales, they rode their luck, until it ran out.
 

Chimera

Member
Location
North Wales
The electric companies are going bust because they have to sell at leas than they are buying.
You can hold the feed company to contract and they will go under. You will then be on the open market and it will cost a fortune.

It's just best if there is an open discussion rather than one sided decisions.
But surely the feed mill will have contracted the required tonnage of raw materials to make your cake on the day they make a contract with you.
 

frederick

Member
Location
south west
But surely the feed mill will have contracted the required tonnage of raw materials to make your cake on the day they make a contract with you.
But what about if they have just come to the end of a three year electric contract and costs have gone from 15p a unit to mid 20s

What if they have just had to give all drivers a 20% pay rise to keep them.

What if their diesel bill has just gone through the roof.

They may have got all their materials sorted but other costs may have eroded any margin they hoped to make.

If my feed company was at risk of insolvency I would rather talk to them to find a solution than suddenly find they've gone bust and have to buy on the open market.
 

Sid

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
South Molton
If my feed company was at risk of insolvency I would rather talk to them to find a solution than suddenly find they've gone bust and have to buy on the open market.
When that happened with First milk they cut their suppliers price because they could and still get supply.
 

Cowabunga

Member
Location
Ceredigion,Wales
The electric companies are going bust because they have to sell at leas than they are buying.
You can hold the feed company to contract and they will go under. You will then be on the open market and it will cost a fortune.

It's just best if there is an open discussion rather than one sided decisions.
If you have a contract with the cake mill for the Winter, as I have, they will have covered your requirement by having a fixed price contract for your tonnage of ingredients, so they certainly will not go bust, or if they do they will have been very poorly managed in terms of risk.
I do know that at least one company has added £5/ton delivery surcharge to cover the unforeseen increased cost of haulage, which sounds like an awful lot on an 18 ton load… £90 EXTRA for each delivery. I doubt whether their increased cost is more than a third of that. After all, it is probably only six weeks ago since they worked out the original contract price for Winter.
 
Hi,we have just received a load of dairy cake which about 1/4 of our cows are rejecting in the parlour.
It is supposed to be the same as we have been using all summer.
Has anyone else been having similar problems,or are we just unlucky with a batch of cake?
Not dairy but sheep cake,we had similar once and they put it down to a new batch of maize gluten that had been over heated or burnt and gone very bitter. Also made it analyze higher in protein than it fed.
 
The electric companies are going bust because they have to sell at leas than they are buying.
You can hold the feed company to contract and they will go under. You will then be on the open market and it will cost a fortune.

It's just best if there is an open discussion rather than one sided decisions.

The fudging feed company should have contract bought raw materials going forward for months, and believe me they all do it to varying degrees because the risk of not doing it is immense.

I had farmers contract their feed for the entire winter and sometimes the summer after that, If I have agreed to supply it I would be an absolute idiot not to purchase the raw materials ahead of time. If a particularly commodity became daftly priced, I would have a conversation with the farmer but in all honesty the big compounders will not be going from month to month with nothing bought ahead of time.
 
If it isn't from someone with a fixed formulation stop buying it and start buying fixed formulation cake.

Changing ingredients to suit themselves is a top way to get cows rejecting stuff. Get the supplying company to suck out the old cake.

To do that, you need leverage.
Quote 'representative sample' (i.e a sample quartered, mixed, quartered again and then tested) and get that analysed. Mention trading standards, sale of goods Act and anything else relevant to your losses, and catalogue your losses.

What else would you want done with the out of spec pellets? Why not grind them up since they are made of feed materials anyway and use them in other products?

That depends on why the 'out of spec' occurred, which could be too high/low protein or something as nasty as mould contamination.

And yes, we've been there.....
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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