As I flew home from my nine weeks of individual Nuffield travel in New Zealand, China, Chile and North America, studying the topic of ‘Inspiring the next generation of dairy entrepreneurs', I found myself asking: 'What have I learned?'
The big story since I last wrote has to be the decline in the number of dairy farmers. Just to put it into some sort of perspective, when we started First Milk I think we had 3,500 members
I would like to start my first column by talking about what is going well, and what is not going so well, which is how we open things up at the robotics milking discussion group I am involved with
Vets Dr John Gallagher and Roger Blowey give their view on the BBC documentary 'Brian May: The Badgers, the Ãļ§Ö±²¥ and Me'
In the coming weeks we look forwards to two important dairy industry events – UK Dairy Day, taking place on September 11; followed by the Dairy Show on October 2
In April this year, farmers across England were receiving £74.2 million for establishing and maintaining herbal leys – the action known as SAM3
In my last column, I wrote about how we were embracing a zero-grazing system, which initially increased our milk yield but significantly added to our workload. Forget that! A few weeks later, yields dipped, grass quality was poor and we were fed up with the extra tractor work and scraping copious amounts of muck. Also, it eventually stopped raining
It's the time of year again to switch off the vacuum pumps, stop making ice and shut the farm gate as we hit the peak three to four weeks of our summer dry period
This week from Alex Black, Ãļ§Ö±²¥ head of news and business
I have recently been helping to chair the British Grassland Society Summer walks across Dorset, Hampshire and Sussex. I cannot help but think that activities like this are just the tonic most farmers need