Weather conditions have made grazing very difficult in a lot of areas this week. Where damage is being done, recommended grazing techniques need to come into play to help keep grass in the diet.

What we want to do is minimise the length of time the cow spends in the paddock. On/off grazing is the best way to do this. Cows will do the majority of their grazing in the two and half to three hours after milking.

So by milking at 7am and letting them out to grass and bringing them back in around 12pm, then milking again at 3pm and bringing them back in at 7pm, cows should be able to get the majority of their daily intake as grass with minimal damage. Try to only let cows over the same piece of ground once. Grazed ground poaches a lot easier so try not to cross over grazed areas to get to the back of paddocks. Set up a spur road and start from the back out where possible.

Set up your autumn rotation planner. From now, we need to be closing up paddocks to ensure we have grass for the spring. Target having 60% to 70% of the grazing block closed up by the first week in November.

Anyone highly stocked with compact calving should aim for 70%. So taking a 100ac farm, you want 60% grazed and closed up by 4 November. If you start closing up the farm tomorrow, you will have 30 days to graze 60 acres, so you know you need to be grazing 2ac a day.

Do the calculation for your own farm and monitor percentage grazed each week. The remaining 30% to 40% can be grazed off in two weeks or you can stretch it out until the end of November depending on how dry your farm is.

Ensure that you meet closing target of 550-700kg DM/ha AFC on 1 December.

  • Grass growth this week averaged 51kg DM/day.
  • Use on/off grazing to help keep grass in diet in poor weather conditions.
  • Set up a plan to have 60% to 70% of your farm closed up by the first week of November.