Grass is disappearing fast here in Donegal, partly due to no fertiliser been spread in the past few weeks, but mainly due to cool temperatures.

I earmarked a paddock for baling almost two weeks ago, but due to poor weather, among other things, I didn’t manage to get it done. Now I’m looking at a situation where I may have to strip graze it because growth has slowed so much.

I have since applied fertiliser, so hopefully growth will pick up and keep me from having to graze it. There's nothing I hate more than grazing covers that are too strong – performance suffers and grass always gets wasted.

Creep feeding

Ground conditions were starting to get sticky, but thankfully have improved over the past few days. Stock seem to be performing well, but I am planning on introducing meal to calves in the next couple of weeks.

Calves have to be fed for four weeks prior to weaning to satisfy the conditions of the new BEEP-S scheme. So, I’m planning on doing something that I haven’t done in six years – I’m using a creep feeder!

The creep feeder has been banned here for many a year as I had come to see it as inefficient, especially with heifers. Calves tend to eat too much meal – some will gorge themselves, while others will get little or nothing.

Heifers

Some heifers will get fat which will put weanling buyers off them when it comes to the weanling sales. While I don’t really sell weanling heifers any more, there is still no point spending money feeding an animal at such a young age to the point of laying down fat when they are just going to lose it when they go into the shed.

I hadn’t really been feeding much meal before weaning for the past few years as I had been focusing on getting as much weight gain as possible from quality grass. Any meal feeding that had taken place was via a raised electric fence wire and troughs.

Bulls

However, I do believe there may be a place for my creep feeder this year in feeding my bulls. I have to feed them anyway for the purpose of the scheme. Getting them built up to ad-lib meal that little bit earlier may not be a bad idea.

For the past couple of years these bulls were getting 4kg of meal and good quality after grass from weaning until housing and were then built up on ad-lib in the shed. I was a little unhappy with some of my carcass weights so had been planning on increasing the level of meal feeding a little earlier anyway.

Hey presto! Stick in the creep feeder.

Whether or not it makes any financial sense remains to be seen. One small problem though, as the creep feeder hasn’t been used in six years, the trough has rotted off it. Think the welder will be needed before the meal!

Read more

Farmer Writes: small jobs with big satisfaction

Farmer Writes: out of the Covid frying pan and into the Brexit fire