More than 120 farmers descended on Houghton Lodge Farm in Leicestershire last Wednesday (5 April) for the launch of AHDB Dairy’s Strategic Dairy Farm.
Houghton will formally showcase best practice, share key performance data and provide the inspiration for dairy farmers to learn from and improve their overall performance.
The Strategic Dairy Farm forms part of AHDB’s new Farm Excellence Platform, which aims to join up the UK’s fragmented knowledge exchange landscape and harness the proven benefits of ‘farmer to farmer’ learning in order to accelerate the uptake of knowledge.
Houghton, a newly formed joint venture between Farmcare Trading Ltd and Evolution farming, will hold regular on-farm meetings and capture and share financial and physical data.
'Ambitious'
Susannah Bolton, AHDB Knowledge Exchange Director said: “We’re ambitious for farmers to succeed and our new Strategic Dairy Farm will provide greater access to the KPIs and business tools that enable them to benchmark and improve their overall performance.”
Speaking at the event Tom Rawson and Charlie Crotty, partners in Evolution Farming, talked through the background to the venture, developments to date and their ambitious plans and targets for the business that will ultimately see 650 cows going through one of three parlours.
Tom Rawson explained: “We’re keen to get other farmers involved and see what we’re doing here at Houghton. We’re really excited by developments with the farm and look forward to sharing our progress.”
AHDB Dairy is funded entirely by milk producers, via a statutory levy on all milk sold off-farm, at the rate of 0.06p per litre. This provides an annual income of around £6.5m
