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The milk price is on the up . . . but so, too, are other costs. Feed costs are, for example, up around £40 a tonne on last year thanks to world market price rises – and this is equivalent to around 1.2ppl for an average farmer using concentrates at the usual 0.3kg/ litre rate.

Mitigating these rises is essential to ensuring profitable production – and there are two main ways to do this: firstly by levering whatever buying power you have and secondly by ensuring every animal performs to their full potential.

Jim Black, who farms 130 cows and 600 ewes at Lockerbie, and is First Milk’s local representative in the area, reckons buying feed from First Milk Direct fulfils both of those objectives. The buying power of FM Direct is enormous and he has nothing but praise for the service, the ease of management and time saving benefits that come through having the cost of the feed knocked off his milk cheque every month, and the technical support he has received from Harbro’s Simon Dodds.

Best Price

“FM Direct’s size and guarantee of payment means I’m certain I’ll be getting the best price for both the straights and compound feeds I require,” he says. “And my cows are performing very well.”

Harbro has all of the nutritional tools of the trade to keep things that way – including carrying out regular silage, grass analysis and accessing Jim’s CIS milk records on the internet.“Simon at Harbro keeps me right and he keeps my cows right.”

If more farmers bought feed via FM Direct the savings could be even greater, Jim reckons. “I’m a strong supporter of the benefits of co-operation, and working together, and FM Direct’s relationship with Harbro on feed is a good example of how we can all benefit.”

Currently members using FM Direct receive discounts against the standard Harbro price – for more information contact FM Direct’s Richard Dobson on 07785 722126.