Grassland farmer of the year announced

Father and son team Denis and Eddie O’Donnell claimed the dairy award and the overall award at a ceremony in Moorepark last Friday. The O’Donnells are milking 316 cows near Golden, Co Tipperary. There are 218 cows being milked on the home farm and 98 cows being milked on a leased unit six miles away in Dundrum.

Over 17t of grass dry matter is grown per hectare. The cows are on course to produce over 500kg of milk solids each and meal feeding levels are less than 500kg per cow. The empty rate this year is 7% after 12 weeks of breeding. Calf mortality is less than 3%. The farm has two employees, Jeremy Furlong and Philip Roche, as well as student help, and the average working week is 48 hours per person. While the above is excellent, the O’Donnells won the award for the way they manage grass. This is Eddie’s big passion. All the cows calve on the home farm and he is responsible for giving them grass in spring.

He says he would regularly have eight or nine reels up to get cows to grass and minimise poaching. Only one morning’s grazing was missed in 2017 and 100% of the farm was grazed by 31 March.

So what’s the secret to becoming Grassland Farmer of the Year? Of course, location and soil type are big factors. The O’Donnells’ home farm is dry and very free-draining. If anything, drought is a bigger risk than too much rain. The outfarm is heavier and grows 1.9t/ha less grass than the home farm at 16.4t/ha. So it is stocked lighter at 2.6 cows/ha.

This is one example of the O’Donnells’ clarity of thought. Everything is measured and monitored and decisions are made based on good data. During the main grazing season, grass is measured twice a week, every Monday and Friday.

Everyone working on the farm does the grass walk and students are asked to back calculate based on how many grazings the cows get in the field to see if their predictions of the pre-grazing yields were correct.

There is a strong focus on achieving the correct residual. Only three paddocks were topped during 2017. If the cows have not cleaned out a paddock properly, they will go back for a few hours and will be moved at noon. If the paddock is not cleaned out by the evening milking, whatever amount of cows are needed to clean it out will be sent there and the rest will move to fresh grass.

In autumn, Eddie starts building up grass from 6 August and by 1 September he hopes to have an average farm cover of 320kg/cow. By 1 October, this should be 400kg/cow. He starts closing paddocks on 7 October and plans to have 70% grazed by 1 November. The farm is closed up at a cover of 700kg to 725kg on 1 December.

The first farm walk of the year is done around the middle of January and a spring rotation planner is drawn up by the end of the month. Eddie wants to see an opening average farm cover of between 950kg and 1,000kg/ha on 1 February.

He grazes aggressively in February, targeting to have 40% of the farm grazed by 1 March and to start the second round of grazing on 1 April. This second round should last for 24 days.

Eddie says the farm goes into mid-season mode from 20 April to 1 August. The team religiously measures grass on both farms twice a week. The target is to keep the average farm cover at between 165kg and 185kg/cow over this period.

The pre-grazing yield is usually around 1,300kg and the rotation length is around 16 to 18 days during this time, with the cows getting around three grazings per paddock.