The unusual summer diet continues in Greenfield Kilkenny with the diet about to turn into pit silage and soya hulls next week.

The May grass silage bales are all but gone so the plastic will have to come off the first-cut silage next week. Soya hulls will be purchased and a hired diet feeder will mix and feed out. Some 50-odd bales will be kept in case machinery is not available on any particular day.

With little or no rain in the past six weeks and little or none in the forecast for Kilkenny, this will be the diet for the next two weeks at least. The diet will be a 16% crude protein nut (3kg in morning and 3kg in the evening) with a mix of soya hulls (4 kg/cow) and silage mix (6/7kg/day).

Farm cover was measured at 269kg last Monday and there is little or no growth. Water remains critical to the herd in these extreme dry and high temperatures.

Cows have access to water in the collecting yard and that takes some pressure off the troughs in the paddock. The clean-up bulls were taken from the replacement heifers last week. AI breeding continues with the herd and there are still two to three bulling per day (almost 10 weeks) into breeding season now.

Cell count remains a work in progress and some will be culled or quarters dried off next week.

The last milk test (12 July) shows a result of about 19kg per cow at 3.73% protein and 4.50% fat (1.5kg MS/cow) at 323,000 cell count, 14 TBC and 4.93% lactose.

Watch: growth and grass disappear on Greenfield Farm Kilkenny

All-silage-and-meal diet beckons for Greenfield

The little bit of grass will be a thing of the past next week as a diet of soya hulls, pit silage and meal will be on menu for Greenfield, writes Jack Kennedy.