“A difficult 12 months” is how Ballyfin farmer Bruce Thompson sums up the last year. Farming mostly heavier soil types on the foothills of the Slieve Bloom mountains, the farm got 1,485mm of rain last year, which is almost 30% higher than normal. On top of this, the farm was locked up with TB for most of the year, so extra stock had to be retained.

The net effect of this is that the farm didn’t have enough silage this spring. The problem now is that rebuilding silage stocks this year is proving very difficult:

“I want to have 120% of the silage we need for the winter on the farm by the end of this year. For us, our requirements are 5.5t of silage per cow, so we want that and 20% more as a buffer,” he says.

At the moment, the farm has about 50% of what it needs as the first-cut silage, which was taken on 18 May, yielded less than expected.

I asked him if he thought it was a mistake to cut it that early.

“I don’t think so as we got good-quality silage and the second cut is flying it now with a cover of well over 1,000kgDM/ha. So, even if things got dry now, I reckon that it would still grow away and if things got very bad and we needed to zero graze it back to the cows we have that option too.”

The second-cut silage area received 3,000 gallons/acre of slurry and 60 units/acre of nitrogen after the first cut was harvested. Most of the farm is at index three and four for phosphorus, so Bruce has no phosphorus allowance.

The silage ground was too wet to spread slurry on before closing for silage this spring, but Bruce did get one bag/acre of muriate of potash spread, which is 50 units/acre of potash.

Stocking rate

There were 300 cows milked on the farm last year, but that’s back to 269 cows now, which is a stocking rate of 2.69 cows/ha on the 100ha milking platform.

There are just over 70 livestock units of youngstock on the farm also and these are grazing on some of the 57ha of outblocks, meaning the overall stocking rate is 2.4 cows/ha. There is 60% of the land area leased in.

A key part of the discussion at the Irish Grassland Association summer dairy tour will be about the ideal stocking rate for the farm.

Bruce says he would like to carry 300 cows and 60 livestock units of replacements, but he is adamant he will reduce stock numbers if he doesn’t get the silage in the yard.

“I don’t think we appreciate the true cost of buying in silage between labour, machinery, wastage, slurry storage and then the impact on milk yield. I’ve no idea what the true cost is but it’s a lot more than the €30 or €40/bale price.

“If we don’t have enough silage in the yard I’m strongly thinking of culling the bottom 10% of the herd by putting them on once-a-day milking and selling in early autumn.

“The differential between cull cow prices and in-calf heifer prices is so small now I could buy an in-calf heifer in January, with better genetics for similar cost,” he says.

Technical performance is solid. The herd sold 461kg MS/cow last year from 1.1t of meal per cow.

Bruce wants to get the meal feeding back to 600kg/cow, or 1.2 times the cow liveweight, which is 500kg for the mature liveweight. The herd is still maturing, with a current age profile at 3.1 lactations. Visitors to the farm will learn about the farm’s excellent fertility performance and innovative approach to problem-solving.

For father-and-son team Roy and Trevor Cobbe, the main challenge at the moment is keeping grass in front of cows. Most of their 42ha milking platform on the outskirts of Portarlington is dry and free draining and summer droughts are a real risk. The milking platform is stocked at 2.76 cows/ha but the Cobbes are farming a total of 80ha, including 7ha of malting barley.

When the Irish Farmers Journal visited the farm last week, Trevor had just increased the meal from 3kg/cow to 6kg/cow and the heifers were getting a bale of hay every couple of days as growth rates had crashed. They would normally be feeding 2kg to 3kg of meal per cow for the summer months and fed 1.1t of meal/cow last year but Trevor reckons it’ll be 1.5t of meal this year.

The Cobbes are running a high-performing herd of Holstein Friesian cows that are delivering the goods in terms of milk and fertility.

The EBI is €231 with €50 for milk sub-index and €120 for fertility sub-index. The herd produced a staggering 578kg MS/cow in 2022, but this was back to 543kg MS/cow last year and Trevor reckons they will do 500kg MS/cow this year.

Roy is putting this down to a lack of grass in spring as the weather was too wet, but he says that the herd is producing similar now to what it was this time last year. Good grassland management is a key feature of this farm with Trevor walking every five days from early spring.

Visitors to the Cobbes’ farm will take part in a discussion on the day about the best way forward in terms of milking facilities on the farm.

The farm has gone from 40 cows 12 years ago to 120 cows today and, over that time, money has been put into cubicle sheds, slurry storage and calf housing.

Milking facilities have improved; the original four-unit herringbone has been increased to six units and has been doubled up so there are 12 milking points, but milking is still taking 2.5 hours in the morning with two people. The discussion on the day will be around the pros, cons and costs of a 20-unit herringbone versus two milking robots.