Beef Management: creep grazing, weed control and summer scour

Creep grazing

Paddock grazing suckler cow and calf pairs is the best way to utilise grass and to keep pasture quality high, but grazing paddocks tightly, especially larger paddocks with small groups of stock, can mean that energy intakes can be pinched for calves.

The best way to alleviate this is to creep or forward graze calves ahead of cows.

Some farmers will opt for heavy duty creep gates, but a simpler option is to raise a strip wire to allow calves to walk under it. Temporary posts for horses are excellent for this as they are taller than standard posts.

Where access to adjoining paddocks is limited e.g. paddock is fenced in with sheep wire or surrounded by ditches, a good compromise is to fence off 1/5th of the paddock to allow only calves to graze this.

When the main paddock is grazed off, simply lift the wire and cows will clean off this small section in a matter of hours. Creep grazing of calves will also allow for small amounts of concentrates to be introduced in a trough.

Doing this as opposed to a creep feeder ensures that all calves receive some concentrates, as opposed to a handful of calves gorging themselves in a creep feeder.

Weed control

Weeds seem to have proliferated better than grass this year, and with the wet spring gone by very little spraying done to control them.

Docks are possibly the greatest headache in silage swards, and with first cut silage now complete on a lot of farms from late May/ early June, the coming week is the ideal time to spray them.

A good rule of thumb on when to spray docks is when the leaf is roughly the size of the palm of your hand. Where docks consist of 15% of the sward or greater, than broadcast spraying will be necessary.

Cheaper and more concentrated control, with less checking of grass, can be achieved through spot spraying, though caution has to be exercised that the correct PPE is worn and that the herbicide used is approved for knapsack use.

A dye can be mixed in the knapsack to better identify what weeds have been sprayed.

Spray on a dry, calm day, and if temperatures are high, spraying should be completed early in the morning or late in the evening.

Adhere to the restriction on grazing or cutting of silage post spraying, with most sprays requiring paddocks to be sprayed two weeks before stock or a mower can be let in.

Summer scour

Summer scour appears to have reared its head again this year. It is normally associated with calves grazing lush paddocks, and although there isn’t an abundance of these around this year, it still seems to be causing an issue.

Fibre in the diet is extremely important to help develop calves’ rumens develop properly.

Hay is generally not chopped short enough to help develop the rumen, so straw is a better option. A good means of feeding straw out in paddocks is to cut holes in the side of an IBC tank and fill it with straw.

This will keep straw dry and can easily be moved between paddocks. A good quality coarse ration should be used as opposed to nuts, and calves should be moved between paddocks frequently.