Hello, my name is Tommi Humphreys from Abermule near Newtown in Mid-Wales. I’m studying agriculture in my second year at Harper Adams University, and currently I’m in my placement year with Wyndford Wagyu.
I came to university to explore unique opportunities I would have never had access to if I had stayed at home. While searching for a placement, nothing particularly caught my interest until I came across Wyndford Wagyu.
Having grown up on a wagyu farm and had visited Wyndford on an open day several years prior, I decided to apply.
After spending plenty of time working on my CV and covering letter, I was offered an interview that went brilliantly, and they offered me the job!
Wyndford Wagyu is a beef farm located only 15 minutes from Harper Adams itself. They have over 400 head of fullblood wagyu cattle, and over 120 Holsteins that are bought in and used as recipients for embryo transfer for the wagyu. The farm focuses on producing premium marble scored beef and use only elite genetics, producing cattle in the top 1% worldwide.
I was very eager to get started. Over the past few months working at Wynford, I have gained more responsibilities – each time learning things I would have never even thought about 12 months ago.
The biggest learning experience for me has been heading into the office and finding out just how much admin goes into the operation, and having plenty to do myself! This included tracking the Holsteins heats ready for embryo transfer and updating calving, medicine and movement records.
On placement, my days start at 7am on Mondays and Thursdays and 7:30 other working days.
The feed passage in the finishing shed consisting of around 130 cattle across 13 pens is mucked out first thing twice a week, hence the earlier starts, before starting the rest of my morning routine.
Although Wyndford Wagyu is primarily a beef producing farm, I still milk twice a day for the Holsteins who have freshly calved. They are milked for a week before heading to market as milking heifers.
With the relatively low number of cattle being milked, Wyndford has a small 4 stall parlour, and it takes between half an hour to an hour depending on how many are being milked.
My day finishes with milking a second time, and finally pushing up silage for all the Holsteins before heading home around 4-5pm.
Weighing, feeding, tagging and taking the calves down to the specialised calf unit are also part of my responsibilities.
All calves are required to have at least 4 litres of colostrum tubed and be given their necessary vitamin jabs, before being taken down to the calf unit and put in hutches to be hand reared.
I spend a lot of time working on a JCB pivot steer to complete most of my work. This includes moving straw bales and filling feed hoppers for young stock, bringing new haylage bales for the cattle not on the TMR ration, and a lot of mucking out. Everything indoors is on straw bedding and aim to be mucked out and re-bedded often to keep a clean environment, with biosecurity being very important here.
I’ve enjoyed being involved in almost every aspect of the system here, working closely with both the Holstein herd and the wagyu right up from birth all the way to finishing and everything in-between.
I can see the knowledge I’ve gained being invaluable in my career going forward. As I mentioned before, I grew up on a wagyu farm, where we’ve had wagyu since 2008, but not at the scale and genetic advancements at Wyndford.
Since achieving this placement, I am certain that working with this breed is the career I want to pursue.
My aim is to finish my year placement and academic years at Harper Adams University, and then to find opportunities in either America or Australia at another wagyu farm where the breed is popularised at a much larger scale than the UK.
Hopefully different experiences, and learning how other places produce their wagyu will give me a better idea of how I want to do things when I bring my knowledge back home to Wales.
