Breeders started producing milk from a herd of 4 cows. Before that, they had not dealt with cattle farming, so they learned it step by step. Renata and Mieczysław from Great Sielesian voivodship have a dairy herd with 230 cows and 250 heifers. Its milk yield in the latest PFHBiPM results for 2020 was 12,133 kg of milk with a fat and protein content of 4.13 and 3.50 percent.
Milk production with a rich history
The production of milk on the dairy farm has a rich history. Breeders started, and basically restarted it, in 1997. – We were thrown into deep water. We were very young when we moved to this farm. It was new to us. We both had nothing to do with practical farming. I graduated from an agricultural school and worked in the commune office, and my husband was a carpenter. So we learned everything on a regular basis – recalls Renata Matysiak and adds:
– It was the husband who wanted to start producing milk, because his parents had a dairy herd in the 1970s. The farmers started producing milk in 1997 with four cows. Three years later, they doubled the herd. In 2003, the breeders built a 65-unit free-standing barn, equipped with a milking parlor, and began expanding the herd. In 2009, they converted the old barn into another free-standing barn on deep litter and slightly extended it so that it is now 56 meters long. In 2019, they modernized the facility, which had been operating since 2003, with two milking robots.
Family farm
Currently, the farmers run the farm together with their sons Paweł and Piotr. Cows receive one base TMR throughout the lactation, prepared for a yield of 30 liters of milk. It consists of maize silage, grass silage, spent grains, pickled pulp, alkalized and pickled corn grains, alkalized grain meal, i.e. barley meal, triticale and rye, vitamin and mineral supplements and a protein corrector.
The herd is genetically improved all the time. Farmers renovate them only with their own breeding material. The cows are kept there for an average of three lactations. Breeders pay a lot of attention to the production of breeding material. Newborn puppies are colostrum-fed using a teat bottle. – At the moment of weaning, calves at least double their birth weight – assures Piotr.
A modern juniper
Since July last year, breeders have been using the new juniper. The animals enter the facility at the age of 10 months and remain there until they are pregnant. There are 115 lairs in it. The building was built with its own resources and according to its own idea and design. – There are few such facilities in Poland. The most popular model for rearing heifers is the bedding model. We wanted to do it differently and prepared our own project. We equipped it with grates and pens, the so-called safety pins with rubber mats – says Piotr.
The dairy farm family breed heifers, which they introduce to the herd, but also offer them to other breeders. This year, until May, they sold 16 pregnant heifers. They assume that their number will exceed 30 by the end of 2021.
