Company AGROCONTRACT Mikulas, a.s. is located in south-western Slovakia, close to city Nove Zamky. It is a family business which farms on more than 5500 hectares of arable land and it is a no.1 holstein dairy farm in Slovakia.
Questions about history, dairy and visions were answered by Mgr.Martin Zahumensky, owner of the company.
Can you tell us something about your farm and its history?
Our dairy farm was a part of state property Mikulas, which was economicaly in clinical death when we took it over in 1992. It was necessary to take decision about the future of cow breeding, we had two options, either we will cull all cows and specialize different way or we will continue with cows and build a completely new herd.
Decision was positive for intensiveholstein cow breeding and everything will be subordinated to it. In November 1993, we imported first 23 holstein heifers from Holland.
Today in company AGROCONTRACT we breed 2500 dairy cows at two dairy farms and except of that each dairy has its own heifer farm where we keep more than 2000 heifers from 3 months of age untill 21 months.
What are your further plans with dairy business?
In 2014 we took a serious investment decission with a plan to expand our capacities in Mikulas for 5000 cows. This year we started a new 72-stall BouMatic rotary and we began with construction of an 8-row barn for approximately 1600 cows with absolutely comfortable free stalls based on deep bedding and use of dry manure solids with and optimal capacity at the feed bunk.
What kind of techonologies you decided to implement into your vision?
Except of top notch rotary parlor it was necessary to invest into all kind of differenttechnologies, which allow the functional every day operation of a big dairy farm with a focus on production cost which we really keep an eye on. Most of the technologies we import from USA, which are proved and tested on the best dairies in the world. Concept of our „new dairy“ we built on alley flushing with recycled water.
Parlor holding area is flushed with clean water, cross-overs and alleys are flushed with recycled flush water. Flushing valves are connected to screen separator which produces material with 22% dry matter and allows you to backflush the separated fluid for further flushings or to irrigation system which is located around the farm.
We try to maximize the efficiency of water usage because we dont have enough water in our area. Except of this separation technology, we use the separation of our slurry with 8-10% of dry matter after which we get 35% dry matter and right after separation it all falls to composting drum where we get after 24 hours a bedding material with dry matter in range from 42-44%.
This dry matter is achieved with blasting air into composting drum which helps to aerobic bacteria to multiply and create heat 67 °C, which kills the pathogen bacteria and produces, lets say, sterile bedding material. Technology BeddingMaster from company Daritech we use 7 years and it impressed us so much that our sales department became a distributor of this technology in mid-Europe including Czech Republic and Slovakia. In comparison to chopped straw we used before we saved on 1000 cows 17000 EUR.
Cows on deep bedding are much cleaner, they like to lie down in stalls and in older barns where we used mattraces after adding dry manure solids on top, the sore hocks completely disapeared, which again improved the comfort of our cows.
With an undirect impact our production increased because cows lie down longer in comfortable free-stalls.
We decreased the cost of manpower because the technology itself is almost without service.
