The Grass Week: setting up an autumn grass budget

Everyone has heard of an autumn rotational planner, which is a guide for farmers to close up their farms. However, it’s just as important to put a plan in place this autumn to build grass covers.

Building grass covers has a huge big effect on the profitability on farms.

Building covers and extending the grazing season out as long as possible should be the target on all farms. Every extra day at grass in the autumn is worth €1.80/cow/day.

However, it’s just as important to clean out paddocks well to set up grass quality for the spring.

Dead material

Poorly grazed paddocks in the autumn will carry dead material across the winter and result in poor-quality grass in the spring.

So it is important to build covers, but also as important to ensure covers that are built are not too strong and that good graze-outs can be achieved.

So how do we plan for this? PastureBase Ireland has a grass budget tool that makes this very easy.

Target farm cover

The program gives you a week-on-week overview of what you need to do in order to build grass to your target average farm cover (AFC).

The target AFC that you should be building to is between 1,000kg and 1,200kg DM/ha.

Setting up the plan and building grass early will help keep supplementation to a minimum.

Building covers too early and carrying too high covers into the winter can also be a big problem on farms and with recent high growth rates, this is maybe where more farms are going to find themselves this year.

Identifying surplus covers and removing them early will be key to staying on track.

Setting up the grass budget is simple.

Complete a grass walk as normal on Pasturebase. Then go to budgeting and grass budget - from here you will have to fill out a small bit of information, which you will have from your last grass walk.

Start date of the budget will be the date of the grass walk and, for anyone starting off using this for the first time, I would suggest setting up the end date of the budget to the middle of October and focus on building grass first.

Once you reach your target cover, you can then focus on closing the farm and budgeting out the grass you have built.

If you identify that you will fall short of the target AFC, then increase supplementation, zero grazed grass from an outblock or lower the demand by selling excess stock, cull cows, etc. These are all options and can be factored into your plan.