Lanarkshire based Hillhead of Covington, has been named as the first AHDB Strategic Dairy Farm in Scotland and the fifth in the UK to join the strategic farm network.

As such, the business will open its gates to local farmers to demonstrate best practice, with concerted efforts to improve efficiency through benchmarking key physical and financial performance data.

Host farmer William Baillie’s ultimate aim is to improve business performance, with initial focus being on nutrition and genetics.

“I’ve been benchmarking for more than five years and I’ve always found it incredibly useful," said William. "Now as a strategic dairy farmer we’ll be benchmarking our performance against AHDB’s key performance indicators for all year round herds. Using that data we will be able to set targets and measure our progress to ensure we are among the best performing dairy farms.”

Hillhead of Covington was bought in 1996 and initially started off with 50 cows. Now, William has 310 pedigree Holsteins and is aiming to grow the herd to 400 cows. Housed all year the round the herd is milked three times a day and is fed a diet of mainly grass silage, whole crop and draff. For William the right diet is key to increasing yields.

“High quality silage makes all the difference to milk yield; you get out what you put in” he says. “We are currently reseeding a lot of the farm at the moment with a medium/late perennial grass to allow us to take five cuts of quality silage this season. We need to get good quality grass as we are growing less whole crop and draff is not easy to get hold of these days.”

Having started a mating programme three years ago William is now considering whether the use of genomics would improve his breeding performance further.

“Genomics offers hard data on the traits the animal will have, rather than those they are likely to have, so I think using them could offer some significant improvements in terms of milk yield, health and lifespan.” William says.

For Paul Flanagan, AHDB strategy director for dairy and Scotland, the strategic dairy farm will offer dairy farmers the ideal opportunity to review their own practices.

He says: “Our optimal systems programme is not about telling farmers what calving system to use, but instead advising them to review their system and ensure it’s performing as efficiently as possible.

“We hope that William’s openness with his figures will get other Scottish farmers thinking about their own. For example, we want them to question their feed costs per litre of milk produced and age at first calving. If they aren’t in the ‘good performance’ bracket then they should be asking themselves why and we can help them figure out how they can get there.”

The first open meeting at Hillhead of Covington Farm will be held on Wednesday, August 29, from 10.45am to 2.30pm. The event will include a farm tour and discussion of William’s current technical and financial performance which will be compared with AHDB’s Optimal Systems KPIs. The group will also map out a long term vision for the farm, including a critical look at areas for improvement and future focus.