This week’s Dairy Focus takes us to another farm in France where the farmer focuses on achieving a high protein percentage for cheese production.
Martial Kovalik is a passionate dairy farmer who farms on his own with some part-time help, on the Earl de l’Avenir farm in Saules, France.
Kovalik has a wife and three kids who do not help out on the farm, and admitted that none of his children are keen on farming.
The farmer is now 30 years on the farm, which consists of 103ha, which is 98ha of grass and 5ha of crops. He told attendees of the farm that since it is not a family farm, he found it tough to get going as the banks were not lending.
When he originally wanted to go farming, he tried to purchase three different farms in which the bank wouldn’t sign off on, until he eventually got his wish on his fourth attempt.
Comté cheese
Kovalik is currently milking 55 Montbeliarde cows where his milk is being sent for Comté cheese production and himself and 19 other farmers form the cheese cooperative and are sending 7.2 million litres of milk to the coop between them.
The French dairy system completely supports the farmers as they get to dictate the milk price as they own and run the cooperatives directly, with no third party getting in between.
France has the largest amount of Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) cheeses in Europe which gives the farmer the control of price and creates a sustainable dairy industry.
As part of the Comté cheese contract, the cow has to be a Montbeliarde, and the farm is capped at producing 4,600kg of milk/ha.
The farm is only permitted to spread 50 units of nitrogen (N)/ha and must have slurry storage for up to four months, but are allowed to spread at any time as long it is not freezing or snowing.
The cows have to graze for at least six months of the year and cannot be fed any fermented feed, so dry hay or dry alfalfa is usually fed instead of silage.
The reason it has to be Montbeliarde, is because the Montbeliardes produce 80% more cheese than Holstein cows, with the same quantity of milk due to their high protein, higher levels of beta casein and kappa casein.
Cows calve all year-round which is also essential for cheese production as there can be no fluctuation in solids and milk produced, as the same supply is needed from one end of the year to the next.
High protein production
The cows on the farm are producing 7,500kg of milk/cow with a fat percentage of 4.2% and a protein percentage of 3.7%.
The dairy farmer has a keen focus on improving his solids each year and sent 420,000L of milk to Comté cheese last year.
The average price paid out by the cooperative last year was €700/t of milk and Kovalik received an average of €760/t/milk (76c/L), which reflects the high quality milk he produces on the farm.
Kovalik’s herd has a very high genetic merit, as the farmer was the number one protein producer in the country out of 15,000 Montbeliarde breeders last year.
As former chair of the cooperative, he said his job was to make sure that the 18 other farmers were producing milk of the same quality.
He said that “the higher percentage of protein, the more cheese that can be made and you can lose 1kg of cheese per 100L of milk if the protein drops”.
On this note, Kovalik expressed how he has to run his farm like a business to make sure quality does not drop and is why he has such am emphasis on making high quality forage in the form of dry hay.
On the farm, Kovalik has a hay dryer machine which can hold up to 16 bales at a time and blows air at 30℃ up through each bale, which can dry 16 bales fully in four hours.
This €85,000 machine allows Kovalik to make quality hay regardless of the weather window, which saves him time and offers the cows optimum forage in terms of quality.
The French farmer revealed that he is earning €100,000 more than the average farmer in the country which is down to being strict in his operation by culling cows not performing, having a high replacement rate producing high quality hay for the herd.
The farmer said that he has “had massive improvement in terms of fertility, somatic cell count, longevity and other qualities, which is great, but I always want to go chasing higher quality milk”.
Farm system
Kovalik has 30 replacement heifers coming through every year, which is a very high replacement rate, but achieving a high genetic gain each year is his basis of high protein production.
The heifers receive 1kg of a 23% protein pellet every day up until they calve down along with some high quality dried hay.
The cubicle facilities are kept very clean and cows are bedded with straw on the cubicles twice daily, as chopped straw is pumped through an auger and shot down onto the cubicle mats automatically.
All of the straw is produced on the farm and Kovalik uses 1kg of straw/cow per day when the cows are in the cubicles.
All of the calves, weanlings, maiden heifers, in-calf heifers, cows, and dry cows are kept under the same roof, all with their own individual section.
The slats above the slurry tanks are only behind the head-locking feed barriers and there is solid concrete at the cubicle stalls, so that all straw and dung can be dragged from the passageway at the cubicles to a dung stead with an automatic pulling scraper.
Milking on the farm starts at 6:30a.m in the morning and the evening milking starts at 6:00p.m, with milking taking less than an hour through an 11-unit one-sided parlour.
The milk is collected every day to produce fresh Comté cheese.
All of the bull semen is bought through Coopex Montbeliarde, who also supplies bulls to the Irish market, with Neil Lahart and Bó Sires being the main supplier of Coopex Montbeliarde semen in the country.
The Montbeliardes are proving to be more than capable of producing a large amount of milk with impressive solids, while being able to last in a herd for a number of lactations.
Their milk production has proven to be on a decent level, with good value to be achieved at the end of their lactation when culling the animal.
Increasing the longevity of dairy cows can reduce their carbon footprint per unit of product, as they can potentially produce more milk over their life span, with a lower replacement rate and fewer emissions from raising heifers.
