With the second cut now ensiled on all programme farms and breeding finished or coming to an end, attention is turning to how to make best use of grass for the remainder of the year and maintain animal performance without the threat of any animal health issues.
Similar to many farmers across the country, Stephen Maguire featured below, finds it beneficial to reduce group sizes, particularly of suckler cows at this time of the year. Despite a seemingly plentiful supply of grass available, cows are easily unsettled and looking to be moved before desired post-grazing residuals have been achieved.
Particularly in wetter parts of the country, reducing group’s sizes to fewer than 20 will help minimise this issue and also result in less stress on animals.
Separate bulls
On farms where calves were December- or January-born and bull calves are not castrated, it is worth dividing the strongest bull calves off into a separate group away from heifers.
Scanning cows now and removing those empty, but still bulling, will also be a help. A queue of 300kg to 400kg bull calves after a bulling cow is unlikely to be assisting performance.
All of the programme farms have different systems of weaning calves over the coming months. Practices across the farms often depend upon availability of housing, land location, timing of calving and timing of sales. However, common across all farms is their focus on ensuring that animal performance is not hit through nutrition, disease or undue stress. To ensure this, some of the best practices across all farms, include:
Forward creep grazing, to reduce the cow to calf bond.Offering creep feed to calves in the run up to, and after weaning.Having a vaccination plan in place to reduce potential for pneumonia.Weaning well in advance of housing and during a period of more settled weather.Gradually weaning batches by removing cows, rather than calves, from the
group.Stephen Maguire, Maguires
bridge, Co Fermanagh
Cattle sorted into smaller batch sizes
This week I am reducing the sizes of cow groups. Keeping batches of 30 cows facilitated breeding, but from now on these larger batch sizes can become very unsettled very quickly on my farm, especially with any changes in weather conditions.
Historically grass tetany can also be a threat on this farm from mid-August onwards, and experience suggests it can occur more often in these larger group sizes. By reducing the numbers of cows in batches from 30 to 20 it will help reduce the likelihood of cows becoming unsettled in the weeks ahead.
I have also noticed in the last few days some of the oldest heifer calves born in January and early February have been coming into heat. Although the stock bull is no longer with this batch, this still causes a lot of activity among the bull calves.
While it is normally the stock bull which catches these heifers, I still don’t want to take the risk, so any heifers seen bulling to date will get a prostaglandin injection.
Each year I normally sell eight to 10 bull calves in the weanling sales. All of these stronger bull calves will now be grouped together and will be offered creep feed over the next week.
They will be moved to an area of the farm which facilitates this best. Rather than putting in a creep feeder, I use a creep gate which allows calves to come on to a lane for feeding in a trough. This also allows calves to creep graze into fresh paddocks more easily than under the electric fence.
The other two batches of calves will be carried over as stores and will not be offered any creep feed until weaning.
Preparing for weaning
This time last year (after a wet August) I had already weaned the heaviest heifer calves which were subsequently kept as replacements. This allowed the cows to be housed to reduce stocking rates for the remainder of the year. At the time, it worked well.
This year I haven’t needed to do this yet. With a plentiful supply of grass and ground conditions holding up, I should be able to delay this for another few weeks. Regrowth after second cut has been really good, allowing all of the in-calf replacement heifers to be removed from the home grazing block and reducing stocking rates there.
When dividing batches this week all calves will receive a second worm dose using an ivermectin-based product. Pre-weaning and housing, all calves will also be vaccinated using Bovillis IBR and Bovipast RSP to offer protection against the main pneumonia-causing viruses. From now onwards I will also be encouraging more forward creep grazing, which should help reduce the stress at weaning, and leaving the calves less susceptible to pneumonia.
70 bales made from
surplus grass
I am walking all paddocks on the farm weekly and recording the grass covers available on each paddock using Agrinet’s online grass budgeting programme.
Doing this weekly helps identify where any grass surplus or deficit may occur based on predicted grass growth.
This has been a real help to me. By the end of this week I should have over 70 bales from surplus grass covers during the summer. Without walking paddocks and measuring covers weekly, I doubt if I would have taken out just as much.
This has also meant that cattle have been grazing swards throughout the summer which are leafy and more likely to result in better animal performance. Paddock grazing has also allowed me to be more flexible with which fields or paddocks to graze when weather and ground conditions have been difficult.
A mix of AI breeding and
stock bulls
With breeding now over for the year, at the end of July I scanned all the cows and heifers and artificially inseminated both to natural heats and through synchronisation.
Of those cows inseminated to natural heats earlier in the year, I had 100% in-calf after six weeks of AI. The synchronisation in both the heifers (inseminated to sexed semen) and the cows (inseminated to conventional semen) yielded conception rates to first service of 62%. This conception rate could be improved upon in both batches.
For the heifers, the use of sexed as opposed to conventional semen obviously had an effect on conception rates. In the batch of cows, checking through my records, half of those not in-calf had issues such as difficult calvings or caesareans which may have contributed to them not conceiving. Given the bulls used this year, I would hope to have less difficult calvings in future.
My plan is to continue to use AI and some synchronisation. I intend running a 60-cow herd, and replacements, but with just one stock bull. In the past I have kept two bulls.
The saving from keeping one less bull, plus the access to better genetics, makes the use of AI on the farm worthwhile for me.
Week in review
Second cut aftermaths now coming into the grazing rotation for all farms.Weaning process commencing on earliest calving farms.Spring 2015 born steers and autumn born bulls being housed on some programme farms.On drier farms where cattle are finished off grass, some meal feeding is now being introduced.
With the second cut now ensiled on all programme farms and breeding finished or coming to an end, attention is turning to how to make best use of grass for the remainder of the year and maintain animal performance without the threat of any animal health issues.
Similar to many farmers across the country, Stephen Maguire featured below, finds it beneficial to reduce group sizes, particularly of suckler cows at this time of the year. Despite a seemingly plentiful supply of grass available, cows are easily unsettled and looking to be moved before desired post-grazing residuals have been achieved.
Particularly in wetter parts of the country, reducing group’s sizes to fewer than 20 will help minimise this issue and also result in less stress on animals.
Separate bulls
On farms where calves were December- or January-born and bull calves are not castrated, it is worth dividing the strongest bull calves off into a separate group away from heifers.
Scanning cows now and removing those empty, but still bulling, will also be a help. A queue of 300kg to 400kg bull calves after a bulling cow is unlikely to be assisting performance.
All of the programme farms have different systems of weaning calves over the coming months. Practices across the farms often depend upon availability of housing, land location, timing of calving and timing of sales. However, common across all farms is their focus on ensuring that animal performance is not hit through nutrition, disease or undue stress. To ensure this, some of the best practices across all farms, include:
Forward creep grazing, to reduce the cow to calf bond.Offering creep feed to calves in the run up to, and after weaning.Having a vaccination plan in place to reduce potential for pneumonia.Weaning well in advance of housing and during a period of more settled weather.Gradually weaning batches by removing cows, rather than calves, from the
group.Stephen Maguire, Maguires
bridge, Co Fermanagh
Cattle sorted into smaller batch sizes
This week I am reducing the sizes of cow groups. Keeping batches of 30 cows facilitated breeding, but from now on these larger batch sizes can become very unsettled very quickly on my farm, especially with any changes in weather conditions.
Historically grass tetany can also be a threat on this farm from mid-August onwards, and experience suggests it can occur more often in these larger group sizes. By reducing the numbers of cows in batches from 30 to 20 it will help reduce the likelihood of cows becoming unsettled in the weeks ahead.
I have also noticed in the last few days some of the oldest heifer calves born in January and early February have been coming into heat. Although the stock bull is no longer with this batch, this still causes a lot of activity among the bull calves.
While it is normally the stock bull which catches these heifers, I still don’t want to take the risk, so any heifers seen bulling to date will get a prostaglandin injection.
Each year I normally sell eight to 10 bull calves in the weanling sales. All of these stronger bull calves will now be grouped together and will be offered creep feed over the next week.
They will be moved to an area of the farm which facilitates this best. Rather than putting in a creep feeder, I use a creep gate which allows calves to come on to a lane for feeding in a trough. This also allows calves to creep graze into fresh paddocks more easily than under the electric fence.
The other two batches of calves will be carried over as stores and will not be offered any creep feed until weaning.
Preparing for weaning
This time last year (after a wet August) I had already weaned the heaviest heifer calves which were subsequently kept as replacements. This allowed the cows to be housed to reduce stocking rates for the remainder of the year. At the time, it worked well.
This year I haven’t needed to do this yet. With a plentiful supply of grass and ground conditions holding up, I should be able to delay this for another few weeks. Regrowth after second cut has been really good, allowing all of the in-calf replacement heifers to be removed from the home grazing block and reducing stocking rates there.
When dividing batches this week all calves will receive a second worm dose using an ivermectin-based product. Pre-weaning and housing, all calves will also be vaccinated using Bovillis IBR and Bovipast RSP to offer protection against the main pneumonia-causing viruses. From now onwards I will also be encouraging more forward creep grazing, which should help reduce the stress at weaning, and leaving the calves less susceptible to pneumonia.
70 bales made from
surplus grass
I am walking all paddocks on the farm weekly and recording the grass covers available on each paddock using Agrinet’s online grass budgeting programme.
Doing this weekly helps identify where any grass surplus or deficit may occur based on predicted grass growth.
This has been a real help to me. By the end of this week I should have over 70 bales from surplus grass covers during the summer. Without walking paddocks and measuring covers weekly, I doubt if I would have taken out just as much.
This has also meant that cattle have been grazing swards throughout the summer which are leafy and more likely to result in better animal performance. Paddock grazing has also allowed me to be more flexible with which fields or paddocks to graze when weather and ground conditions have been difficult.
A mix of AI breeding and
stock bulls
With breeding now over for the year, at the end of July I scanned all the cows and heifers and artificially inseminated both to natural heats and through synchronisation.
Of those cows inseminated to natural heats earlier in the year, I had 100% in-calf after six weeks of AI. The synchronisation in both the heifers (inseminated to sexed semen) and the cows (inseminated to conventional semen) yielded conception rates to first service of 62%. This conception rate could be improved upon in both batches.
For the heifers, the use of sexed as opposed to conventional semen obviously had an effect on conception rates. In the batch of cows, checking through my records, half of those not in-calf had issues such as difficult calvings or caesareans which may have contributed to them not conceiving. Given the bulls used this year, I would hope to have less difficult calvings in future.
My plan is to continue to use AI and some synchronisation. I intend running a 60-cow herd, and replacements, but with just one stock bull. In the past I have kept two bulls.
The saving from keeping one less bull, plus the access to better genetics, makes the use of AI on the farm worthwhile for me.
Week in review
Second cut aftermaths now coming into the grazing rotation for all farms.Weaning process commencing on earliest calving farms.Spring 2015 born steers and autumn born bulls being housed on some programme farms.On drier farms where cattle are finished off grass, some meal feeding is now being introduced. 
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