Grass+: grazing season winding down everywhere

Average grass growth this week on our Grass+ farms is 15kg/day. Most herds have been housed fully by now, or are coming in over the next few days.

It’s a real bonus for farmers on heavy land to be able to have cows out until mid-November. For the first time in a long time, farmers are housing cows because they are running out of grass, not because ground conditions are too bad for grazing.

The definition of running out of grass is not when the farm is skinned, rather it is when you hit the target closing cover.

Achieving the target closing cover means you are carrying over grass to next spring. When we talk about closing covers, we are talking about how much grass is on the farm on 1 December. There is scope to go lower than the target now, and then house fully and allow growth for the rest of November to bring the farm back up to target closing cover, which is usually between 600 and 800kg/ha depending on stocking rate and demand in spring.

You would expect the farm to grow around 200kg/ha between now and 1 December.

Milk yield is likely to drop when cows do come indoors fully. Keeping some grass in the diet for longer will help to maintain yield and protein. Keeping cows in by night and out by day will help to achieve this, but the problem then is that it’s much harder to get a good cleanout when there is a lot of silage in the diet. It might be more beneficial to get the grass grazed off now, when conditions are reasonably good.

The weather forecast for the next week is fairly good so there should be a good chance to get the remaining high covers grazed off.

The important thing is to prevent damage now as much as possible by grazing in square blocks, using a back fence, only grazing for short periods and walking cows along roadways or cow paths to get to grass. But at the end of the day, having more grass next spring will be more beneficial than gaining extra days now.

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Grass+: into winter-mode as grazing winds up