42 MALLARD GRANGE AUG / SEP 2021 • farmers-mart . co . uk
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acres of Fuego spring beans and 11 acres of Lucerne . The wheat and beans are sold with the rest all kept for feed for the livestock .
‘ We are now growing Lucerne because of our move towards finding cattle breeds that do better off grass than grains and soya ,’ says James . ‘ We ’ ve had our first lot of heifers that we ’ ve grown through winter fed on no concentrate and just on grass , Lucerne and silage and they have done far better than our heifers had done on grass , silage , barley and soya . That is fantastic , so we are now just using Lucerne , grass silage and wholecrop which includes oats because we are in an environmental scheme that requires wholecrop .’
The Johnsons have around 400-head of cattle on the farm at some point in the year and calve down around 150 animals a year .
‘ We switched our cattle system from buying heifer calves out of Carlisle and other marts as replacements for our suckler herd because it was getting expensive and we weren ’ t getting the stock we wanted .’
‘ We now have an arrangement where we nominate the Limousin sire that goes on to a local dairy farmer ’ s older cows on the first service , so that we get the most fertile calves from his most fertile cows . We take all of the heifer calves from him at 12 weeks , rear them on , calving down at two to two and a half years old and then keep so many and sell so many .’
‘ That means we are calving 75 heifers and 75 cows a year . It ’ s a beef breeding
‘ We are now growing Lucerne
because of our move towards finding cattle breeds that do better off grass than grains and soya ’
heifer replacement enterprise as we then keep so many of the heifers in the cow herd as replacements .’
It has been a programme that James says has attracted interest from other farmers who now buy those heifers that have calved as replacements for their own herds .
‘ We sell a number from home and some at livestock markets . Pateley Bridge and Leyburn have been successful for us this year through auctioneers Libby Bell and Stephen Walker who have done a wonderful job of promoting us . We are using a Limousin or Blonde on the heifers in order that the calves have a neat shape , which is what the buyers want . We are not worried about the breed of the bull so long as the heifers can calve easily .’
‘ We are using a Charolais on the cows as they offer better growth rates and we will use a bit of AI . The bulls produced off the Charolais bull generally go to ABP at
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