News:
| Alistair Leads the Way! |
Alistair Hutton, who farms 160 high yielding cows at Lochfergus farm, near Ayr, with his father Alan has just completed First Milk Academy’s lameness prevention workshop, as well as finishing the Academy’s fertility workshop last December. “The workshops were very beneficial,” he says. “On the fertility side, I have learned to watch the cows a lot more, and I know much more of the dietary factors and influences than I did before.” Alistair is now focusing more each day on observing the cows and picks-up two to three more cows bulling per day. Although the farm still prefers to use natural service over AI, identifying bulling cows does help management when it comes to scanning the cows later. The lameness prevention workshop showed Alistair the structure of a cow’s foot; how to be more proactive with foot trimming, and how to adopt more preventative practices. “Now, we get the foot trimmer in once every six weeks - before it was more like every eight to ten weeks,” he added. He has also gained personally from the sessions and would recommend them to others. “They were very interesting. You see more, and understand more as a result.” His father Alan also endorses the workshops. “Fathers think their sons will pick up things naturally, but they are better getting proper training. There are always new ideas and techniques which come along and can benefit the job. “He did the courses and came back talking about them and suggesting new things. We’ll try and implement some of them as there’s no point in attending these sessions if we don’t do something afterwards. “Above all though, it is fuelling Alistair’s enthusiasm for dairying. He’s keen and I’m very pleased about that. When it came to leaving school he had the choice of coming back home or potentially earning more in other jobs. But he has his head screwed on and looked to the future, and he sees as good one, with all the talk on future food security. I’m delighted,” said the proud father. |