Rhual Dairy

Follow our journey if you are interested in:

• Increasing your milk yields to over 9,000 litres 

• Increasing production from grassland and forage by 1,000 litres per cow

• Improving transition cow management

• Reducing the use of antibiotics 

• Developing a resilient system that unlocks more time

Follow our journey on Twitter by searching for #SDFRhualDairy 

Overview

John and Anna Booth have been share-farmers at Rhual Dairy since 2001.  John and Anna host Open Farm Sunday and have just begun ‘FaceTime a Farmer’.  The farm is also taking part in two university trials; one looking at techniques to establish cover crops into Maize, another into calf housing. 

Our farm

Based just outside Mold in North East Wales, Rhual is a 220ha farm, of which 182ha is grassland (of which 50% parkland), 21ha maize, and 11ha spring barley.  The farm has operated under Nitrogen Vulnerable restrictions for many years. 

Our herd

This all-year-round calving herd of 336 Holstein Friesians averages 8,472litres per cow per year at 3.89% butterfat and 3.29% protein. All replacements are home reared and calve at 24 months old, contributing to their low replacement rate of 22%.  A new transition cow shed has been built to enable better management and transition of dry cows pre and post-calving, plus recent refurbishments to cow housing such as improved ventilation, LED lights on a timer system, and increasing available cow feed space. 

Our journey

After both graduating from Harper Adams in 1997, John initially worked as an assistant farm manager and Anna a Dairy specialist, before beginning their share-farming journey at Rhual Dairy in 2001.  Since 2001, they have grown stock numbers, output, and improved farm infrastructure considerably. Their aspirations as Strategic Farmers is to continue developing their resilient system and increasing production from their 91ha Parkland, both while building more free time into their daily operations for their family.

Our key performance figures

Rhual Dairy openly share their KPIs so you can see how they perform against a number or technical and financial measures.

• Review our key performance indicators here

Previous meetings and updates

• June 2019 - Rhual Dairy strategic farm launch - John and Anna Booth give overview of the farm, its systems and processes, key performance indicators and their aims over the next three years 
• October 2019 - Transition and cow management - John and Anna Booth are joined by Phil Clarke from P&L Consulting and Dr Kemp from Wern Vets to provide an overview of their recent work on transition cow management
• February 2020 - Milking grass in high yielding herds - John and Anna Booth are joined by Andre van Barneveld as they look to improve their grazing platform by getting more milk from forage
• September 2020 - Healthy calves, healthy profit - John and Anna are joined by Dr Robert Hyde to talk about how they have improved calf management

• Targeting cost of production - How John and Anna Booth achieve a full economic cost of production of 28.2ppl, placing them just outside the top 5% of GB herds.

• March 2021 - Reducing electricity costs - John and Anna explore the basic principles of good energy efficiency with Jon Swain from NFU Energy.
• February 2022 - Building Farm Business Resilience - John and Anna are joined by Oliver Hall, Senior Farm Business Consultant at The Andersons Centre, to discuss how the team at Rhual Dairy can ensure that they are managing a resilient business, and what to consider when investigating options for diversification.

Find out more about the funding of our strategic dairy farm programme in Wales

Explore our other strategic dairy farms