Watch: BETTER Farm NI – higher grass utilisation with paddock grazing

This week’s rain, combined with warm humid conditions, will lead to a surge in grass growth where fertiliser has been applied in the past two to three weeks on programme farms.

As growth rates increase, grass utilisation becomes important to maintain high-quality grazing swards.

Every effort should be made to graze swards tight to ground in this rotation. The target is to get swards down to a residual cover of around 4cm, which is basically level with the toe of your boot.

Grazing swards tight prevents dead matter building up, turning the base of the sward white. Dead grass is low in feed value; therefore, animal performance suffers. With the sward cleaned out, regrowth will be mainly leaf, which is highly digestible, sustaining higher weight gains in growing cattle and milk production in cows. It will also help boost cow fertility due to higher dry matter energy intakes.

While grazing swards tight to ground is highly recommended, the programme farmers will prioritise grazing groups where swards are of lower quality or have a high percentage of stem and dead material present.

Freshly calved cows, replacement heifers and cattle that will be finished in autumn are given top priority at grass.

These animals will be first into a paddock and moved within two to three days. Dry cows or sheep will then clean out the remaining grass before resting the paddock for the next rotation.

Week in review

Spring calving draws to a close

We have five cows left to calve and they should be finished up inside the next week to 10 days hopefully. In-calf cows are still indoors and being fed haylage and minerals.

Calving started on 1 March and went well. There were 46 cows to calve this spring and we lost just one calf. The only other loss was a cow that was scanned in-calf, but has since re-absorbed the embryo.

Freshly calved cows are at grass and they are settled, with their calves doing well. I am just using lick buckets to cover for minerals at grass and, so far, there have been no issues.

The cows are calving to Angus and Stabiliser bulls. We have a few Limousin calves from an older bull who had a sub-fertility problem last year. He was replaced with the Stabiliser bull. Hopefully, we will be able to pull the end of the calving pattern forward next year.

AI

Breeding has started on the farm. I synchronised 11 heifers along with nine cows and they were inseminated on Monday of this week.

Cows were synchronised using PRIDS, with the device inserted on Friday 3 May and removed on Friday 10 May.

We used fixed-time AI to inseminate cows on Monday, with cows served with two Stabiliser bulls, Givendale Norseman and Givendale Oswald.

Along with the AI, I have bought in 10 Stabiliser heifers to build cow numbers. I think the Stabiliser breed is a good option for my herd. They are good functional cows that flesh well at grass, milk well and have good fertility.

The stock bulls will join the cows in a couple of weeks, catching any repeats and later-calving cows.

Finishing cattle

I have 10 bulls being fed to finish later this month or early June. The bulls are split in two pens of five and are on straw bedding. They are being fed 9kg of concentrate, split into three feeds per day of 3kg. They are also on straw to provide roughage.

Concentrate is a 50:50 mix of homegrown barley and a high maize beef finishing blend purchased through a local merchant.

The blend costs £180/t and, valuing homegrown grain at £140/t, the daily meal feeding costs for the bulls is £1.52/head.

Bulls were weighed on Tuesday. They had an average daily weight gain of 1.56kg/day since their last weighing. The first group averaged 676kg liveweight, while the second group averaged 622kg.

At 60% kill-out, the bulls would be gaining 0.9kg/day of carcase. At a beef price of £3.60/kg, the bulls would be generating a daily income of £3.24, so they are covering finishing costs.

Setting up paddocks

Since joining the programme, I have started to set up paddocks on the grazing ground. After a few weeks, I can see a huge difference in the grazing potential of the farm.

Grass utilisation is much higher and it is improving sward quality. The paddocks are showing up how understocked we are on the farm. We are carrying 0.89CE/ha at present.

With surplus grass, we took out 3ha of grazing as baled silage last week. It yielded 15 bales of high-quality grass. We mowed the grass and raked it using our equipment, with a contractor baling and wrapping it.

A 12-acre grazing field was split into four paddocks using pigtail fencing stakes, two electric reels, a battery fencer and one 100-gallon concrete water trough. Water piping was simply rolled out over the ground.

Figure 1 shows how the field was split into four, with one trough serving four paddocks. The field is carrying 20 cows and calves. Setup costs are outlined as follows: