Watch: BETTER farm NI – keeping the focus on grass utilisation

We are entering the second half of the grazing season and the focus on grass management will be different compared with earlier in the year. Grass has now passed the stage when it turns to stem and seed. In well-managed paddocks where swards are properly grazed out, grass quality will remain good even if covers become too strong for cattle.

Therefore, grass utilisation becomes the main grazing challenge. As the summer progresses, building grass covers is also important to try to extend grazing into the autumn period for as long as ground conditions permit.

Where grazing swards still have headed out grass, they should be topped. Leaving headed out grass in a sward will reduce grass growth for the rest of the season, leading to a possible grazing shortage.

Swards should be topped as low as possible, ideally to about 4cm to remove all dead matter from the sward. Once dead grass, or headed out grass has been removed, there will be no need to top grass again this year.

Ideally a compound NPK fertiliser should be applied after topping to kickstart grass growth again. Applying 25 to 30 units per acre of nitrogen will suffice and then be replicated after each grazing during July and August to build grass covers for the autumn.

Where there is too much grass on farm, paddocks should still be taken out for silage as soon as possible.

Alternatively, reducing the size of grazing paddocks will give higher utilisation, as will strip grazing using electric wire.

Bull beef

Our spring-born 2016 bulls are now finished, with the last group of animals being killed last week. In total, there were 19 bulls finished and we are delighted with how they performed. Finishing bulls is definitely the best option for selling cattle on this farm.

Carcase weights ranged from 420kg back to 362kg, with bulls being killed at 13 months of age. Average carcase weight was 390kg, which gives a lifetime carcase gain of about 0.93kg/day.

Taking a beef price of £3.65/kg, this works out at a daily income of £3.39 for every day that the bulls were on farm from birth to slaughter.

The youngest bull was just over 12 months of age and killed out at 380kg. Despite the young slaughter age, all bulls were hitting fat class 3.

Bulls were finished on 1.2t of meal, which was a blend of soya, barley and distillers and worked out at £181/t.

Bulls were housed last autumn and finished over about 200 days, with average daily liveweight gain around 1.6kg/day from housing until finishing.

Bulls were started off on 2kg of meal and built up on to ad-lib levels. Over the 200-day housing period, they would have averaged 6kg of meal per day, which cost £1.09 per head.

At 1.6kg/day of liveweight gain, the bulls would have been gaining around 0.96kg of carcase per day which is worth £3.50/day in terms of income, meaning the bulls were more than covering their feed costs and leaving a margin.

Autumn bulls

There are eight 2016 autumn-born bulls to kill this back end. They are on 5kg/day of the same blend that the spring-born bulls were on and they are thriving well.

Hopefully they will be killed in November or early December. Again, they should be upwards on 400kg carcase weight when slaughtered.

High spring breeding activity

Spring calving finished up on 29 May with 70 cows and 70 calves on the ground. There were 76 cows scanned in calf, but we had a few losses just like everyone else.

Breeding started back on the first week of June. We are only putting 68 spring cows to the bull as there are a couple of cows we are planning to cull.

There are also 19 maiden heifers bred in June as we are building cow numbers. The heifers were synchronised using a CIDR programme and served to AI on 1 June.

Angus sires were used with Americano and Red Canyon. We have used these bulls before and are pleased with calf quality, as well as his calving ease.

Heifers got one service to AI and on 14 June we put the stock bull in with them to catch any repeats. The plan is to take the bull away on 6 July.

The heifers are being served with a new Limousin stock bull we purchased this spring. We sourced him from the same herd as our other Limousin bull as we are pleased with how he has performed on farm. We have four stock bulls in total. Heifers are served with the new Limousin, while cows are mated with the older Limousin, a Simmental and a Stabiliser bull.

The Stabiliser ran with heifers last year, but he was harder to calve than we would have liked. Therefore, he is running with mature cows only this year.

Cows have been given a bolus for iodine, selenium and copper as well as other trace elements, but they also have access to magnesium lick buckets at grass.

Autumn cows

Autumn calving is due to start around 28 August and cows were weaned in the shed before going out to grass. The cows are being used to mop up rough grass after spring cows or young weanlings.

There are 19 cows to calve and they scanned fairly tight. They should be mostly calved inside three weeks going by scanning dates. Cows will calve outside on a paddock next to the yard.

Grazing

Grass growth has been excellent during June. We made 260 bales of good quality silage from surplus grazing this year with five acres per week being baled in the last month alone.

Grazing ground is getting 30 units per acre of nitrogen after every rotation. If grass has not been grazed tight by cattle, the paddock is topped before resting. Cows and young cattle are moving on to high quality after grass in every paddock.

The bales made from surplus grass will be targeted to finishing cattle and autumn cows this winter.