Balancing nutrients like nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) is a growing priority for UK dairy farms. With tightening regulations and environmental pressures, the need to efficiently manage these essential nutrients is more critical than ever.

Supplemental feeding is crucial in late pregnancy to support the ewe’s rising nutritional needs, the rapid growth of lambs, udder development and the production of colostrum.

A customer is taking part in a trial feeding larvae to one house of birds and comparing the outcomes to the sister flock on the same farm, acting as a control group.

Well, what a strange weather year this is turning out to be?!
Some of you are saying that you have had one of your best grass years and others of you are saying that the rain never seems to have stopped falling from the sky?! One of the main reasons that we all love agriculture is that no two days, seasons or farms are the same. At a time where we are seeing fluctuating markets, challenging harvesting windows, high costs, what can we hope to achieve by 'controlling the controllables'?

Egg shell quality is mostly influenced before the egg is laid. The thickness of the shell is directly related to the time the egg spends in the shell gland—generally, the longer it remains in the gland, the thicker the shell will be. This means that eggs laid earlier in the day tend to have thicker shells compared to those laid later.

Flushing ewes, which involves increasing their feed before and during tupping to improve ovulation, has been a common practice for many years. However, with advancements in sheep management, grazing strategies, and modern techniques like sponging, using teaser rams, and selecting fertile tups, flushing may be becoming less necessary.

Focus: Improving Soil Management

For livestock farmers, soil management is often overlooked in favour of more immediate concerns like animal health and feed supply. There seems to be a misconception that the soil will grow crops regardless how its farmed.

As summer comes (all three days of it) and goes the farming calendar turns to autumn, and thought turn to reseeding, be it after cereals, grass or maize crops. However, there is a growing consensus that August may be a more strategic time for this task (maybe not for maize but you get my drift).

Biosecurity is the foremost line of defence against infectious diseases in commercial poultry, sometimes being the only safeguard, as with Avian Influenza.

Protein supplementation represents a significant expense in dairy rations. Unfortunately, dairy cattle struggle to efficiently convert feed nitrogen into milk and metabolizable protein.