Bucket feeding disappearing
But the least labour efficient farmers take three or four minutes to do the same job.
More than four in every 10 calves on the average size dairy farm are still bucket fed, but this traditional system of calf rearing is being pushed out by labour shortages.
According to John McNamara, Teagasc Specialist, the days of rearing calves indoors in individual pens with buckets are rapidly coming to an end.
On such farms, there is huge potential to reduce the labour associated with calf rearing, particularly practices like transporting milk in buckets and manually cleaning out sheds.
One of the options for farmers with such systems is outdoor calf rearing. In Teagasc surveys, those who have changed over to outdoor calf rearing would not go back, because of advantages such as reduced respiratory disease.
Farmers should be targeting 8 to 10 hour spring working days, instead of the 14 hour days uncovered by labour surveys, said John McNamara.
They should look at their calf rearing, at which the more labour efficient farmers spend almost an hour and three quarters less per day than the least efficient farmers.
Teagasc surveys also show that only 3% of farmers under 250,000 litres in quota size use a barrel and teats system for rearing calves, but 40% of the larger scale producers use this system.
Bucket feeding is still used on 42% of smaller farms, but only 4% of the larger farms used it.
Automatic feeders are on 16% of farms up to 327,000 litres scale (72,000 gallons) in quota size, with 32% of farms with quotas over 130,000 gallons have gone automatic.
Teagasc research work at Moorepark and Grange showed that once a day feeding with teats was the most labour efficient; the least efficient was twice daily feeding with buckets.
