So the rain arrived in a proper fashion on Friday night and Saturday morning this weekend. It’s hard to believe that heavy clay farms not very far away were growing over 60kg per day while the Greenfield farm was only growing half of that.

Most of the other counties in the east have long since recovered on growth rates, but, a number of farms in the Kilkenny area and some parts of Tipperary are only this weekend getting enough rain to satisfy the moisture deficit that was established over the summer.

If you drive past the farm you can see lovely green grass. However, the reality is there is just not enough of it there.

Moisture

The best paddocks have a cover of 1,000kg but then the majority have a cover of 500kg and all they need is moisture and time to allow them bulk up. The average farm cover is at 400kg when normally it would be heading for over 1,000kg – it’s a simple moisture problem, nothing else.

Growth rate for the last seven days came in at the mid 30s when some other parts of the country are getting 100kg plus per day.

It means the feed wagon is still flat out and farm staff are still very busy feeding out the ration with a taste of silage and hay well mixed and allocating 5 to 6kg of grass dry matter. Another 23t of concentrate landed in the yard retailing at €295/t.

Scanning

The good news this week was the scanning result. Just reward for all the hard work observing and serving cows in May and June. There were 25 of the 308 cows scanned not in-calf. Over 70% of the herd are due to calve in the first six weeks.

Remember the majority are in-calf to AI and the breeding season started in May finishing in late July. We will come back with more detail.

Milk test

Milk is holding up. The last milk test (6 September) shows a result of about 18.0kg per cow at 3.99% protein down slightly from 4.04% protein, 4.72% fat which is up from 4.71%, so that is essentially around 1.6kg MS/cow. Cell count is at 208 SCC, 7 TBC and 4.74% lactose. The August average for protein and fat is coming in at 3.86% protein and 4.79% fat.

Read more

Balancing money in and money out