Farmer Writes: grazing 30% by end of February feels like a fool's errand

The weather is continuing to cause plenty of challenges for us right through February. The snow and sleet over the last few days is just the icing on the cake. In fact, the best weather we’ve had since last September was unfortunately when the cows were fully housed in late December and early January.

This weekend looks particularly bad, with another 20mm to 25mm of rain due, so the cows will be spending a fair bit of time on concrete again. There is plenty of good-quality feed in the silage pits to keep the milk flowing. The extra work and slurry generated by having them back in again is getting a bit tedious at this stage.

Trying to graze 30% of the farm, as recommended, by the end of February feels like a bit of a fool’s errand some days, with more harm than good being done.

Clean-outs are very average at times, gaps and areas around water troughs are cut up more than usual and if one of those squally showers turns up, the cows just queue at the gap to be let back in. You can’t take your eye off the ball for a minute.

We will continue to fight the battle over the next few weeks and get the girls out to the paddock as much as possible. We have good grazing infrastructure in place on the farm and we still have some dry paddocks to graze, but if they have to stay in, the gate will be closed. Hopefully the weather turns soon, but in recent years, we have been seeing more prolonged periods of both wet and dry weather, so nothing would be a surprise.

On a positive note, the re-growth on ground grazed early in the year is, surprisingly, very strong. We have half a bag of urea out over most of the farm since last month and we have spread slurry on another portion of the ground that was grazed early. It’s great to see a response from this fertiliser and hopefully whenever the rain does clear up, we will have some top-quality feed available for the second rotation.

On the calving front, we have just over 75% of the herd calved at this stage, with under 100 cows left to calve, so we are making good progress. Herd health is generally very good, with a couple of issues with freshly calved cows. We had a few cases of milk fever last week and a couple of older cows have calved down with mastitis.

We have the calves very tidy in the yard thankfully, with both beef and dairy replacement calves sold in the last few weeks. The number of surplus calves is very small now, with the next batch to be born and booked in for sale again as soon as BVD tests and paperwork are in order. Calf health is still holding up very well, with the first 100 replacement calves doing well on the automatic feeder.

We have only another 20 dairy-bred calves due and the rest are a mix of Angus, Hereford and Aubrac. We will limit the replacement heifers to roughly what we need for our own use, and the rest will be sold on. There is plenty of demand for these animals, so we might try some sexed semen on the maiden heifers this spring, to try to generate a few more to sell next spring.