CREAM Finance and Promotion Team

CAFRE higher education programmes produce agricultural graduates with both theoretical and practical skills. Students on both the Higher National Diploma and Agricultural Technology degree study farm enterprise management modules that contain individual enterprise student learning projects. The CREAM project, where students manage a high output/input Holstein dairy herd, is one of four options.

Sponsored by the CREAM herd’s current meal supplier Fane Valley Cooperative, ten CREAM students set out on a study tour to the Border region of Scotland earlier this month. The main aim of the tour was to reinforce the learning outcomes taught in the dairy portion of both the Agricultural Technology degree and HND Agriculture programmes through a series of visits to high input/output dairy farms. This aim was certainly fulfilled with visits which included Danish Jersey, Organic, high input Holstein and Brown Swiss herds.

The students were particularly impressed with the visit to the Jersey herd (200+ cow farm owned by Mike Haigh outside Glenluce which was achieving a herd average of 5620 KG of milk at 6.65 percent butterfat and 4.07 percent protein). During the visit they gained a heightened appreciation of the increasing importance of solids in milk as Mike was receiving 26 pence per litre of milk from a local cheese making factory.

A second notable visit was to the former Alta-Pon farm now run commercially in Newtown-Stewart. 500+ cows are kept indoors all year round achieving an average of 10,500 litres per year and at 4.2 percent fat and 3.3 percent protein, milking on an impressive 50 point rotary parlour three times per day. Farm management was kept simple with one ration for the entire milking herd (heifers, cows and late lactation cows).

The students made the return journey home with an extremely positive outlook for the future of dairy farming, hoping to implement some of the innovative husbandry and management practices they observed.

Denis Torrens, Greenmount dairy stockman, discusses the visit to the Jersey herd at Glenluce, with some of the CREAM students

Ross Murray (Agricultural Technology degree student) inspects the replacement stock on the Brown Swiss dairy herd visit near Dumfries