Grazing season coming to an end for finishing cattle on NISBP farms

With the weather becoming more settled over the past week, the programme farmers have now caught up with reseeding plans and getting slurry or fertilizer out on to bare fields or those with low grass covers. With day length getting shorter, daytime temperatures and soil temperatures will be starting to fall off in the coming weeks.

Therefore, delaying the last round of fertilizer will give a reduced grass growth response, compared with fertilizer that has been spread in the past week.

The programme farmers have been building grass covers for an extended autumn grazing of weanlings and autumn calves. Finishing cattle will not be grazed into late autumn and spring cows will also be a low priority grazing group.

If there is sufficient grass available and ground conditions allow, spring cows will continue to graze. But if conditions deteriorate or grass supplies are getting tight, cows will be housed to give weanlings preference for grass, as they will have a better growth response per kilogramme DM consumed.

Cattle due to be finished by Christmas will be housed before the end of September and start the intensive feeding period.

Holding these cattle out at grass into October will cause performance to drop and cattle to lose condition. This is caused by declining dry matter in grass, meaning that steers have to eat more grass in late autumn just to maintain the current performance levels.

Over the course of the programme, the farms that housed finishing cattle in September experienced no setback in performance after housing.

If anything, there has been a period of compensatory growth, with liveweight gains in steers of 1.5/kg/day for six to eight weeks.