Textbook spring conditions in Cavan

Like most farmers, Barry Reilly is counting his blessings after a superb spring.

The Kingscourt, Co Cavan man hasn’t missed a day of grazing yet this spring and the herd hasn’t eaten a mouthful of silage since the first week of calving back in mid-February.

Well-known for his exploits on the football pitch and as the former farm manager of the Teagasc research farm at Ballyhaise, Barry returned home to farm full-time at the end of 2022, making this his third spring as a full-time farmer.

Working alongside his father Eugene and 16-week placement student Cian Garvan, the Reillys are milking 135 cows on a 51ha milking block between Kingscourt and Bailieborough in east Cavan.

Barry describes the land as good quality and says he can get grass into cows in most weather.

It’s definitely a dry farm for the locality but at 800ft above sea level and with a lot of black soil and steep hills, it’s not an easy farm either.

Magic day is not 15 April around here, it’s more like 25 April before we’ll be growing 60kg per day

Outside of the milking block, Barry is farming 38ha of land in three different sections between owned and leased land, 8ha of which is a new lease for 2025.

These land blocks are used for growing silage and rearing replacement heifers.

The milking platform stocking rate is 2.5 cows/ha while the overall stocking rate is at 2.2 cows/ha.

Last year the farm grew 14.5t DM/ha, in what was a difficult growing year for most farmers.

However, this was an increase on the year before for Barry, when he grew 13.4t DM/ha. I asked him if he has scope to increase the stocking rate a bit more;

“I don’t think so. I still had to buy silage in last year, although the extra land in the system now should eliminate that. I worked it out and I have 26 grazings left in the first round and I think I’ll need every bit of it, and this is in a good spring.

“Magic day is usually not 15 April around here, it’s more like 25 April before we’ll be growing 60kg per day. Now, it does take off around then in a shot and we could be growing nearly double that for a few weeks, but having a higher stocking rate will just make managing spring grazing that much harder,” he says.

Six-week mark

Due date for calving was 19 February but Barry had 10% of the herd calved by then. He had 80% calved when the Irish Farmers Journal visited last Monday, which was around the six-week mark, so he missed out on the 90% calving target.

Fertility is never brilliant, he says, with the herd at 13% empty after 12 weeks of breeding.

The EBI is high at €243, with €85 for milk and €105 for fertility. Originally a typical black and white herd crossed with Jersey, Barry has been only using high EBI black and white bulls for the last few years but is very selective about what bulls he picks and what cows they go on.

Milk solids

Increasing milk solids is his objective and he’s doing that by using bulls with a high PTA for fat and protein per cent. The herd average is 0.26% fat and 0.17% protein and they are at -18kg for milk volume. Only cows that are doing more than 4% protein on milk recording get served to dairy, everything else gets beef.

“The EBI for maintenance figure for the herd is €19 and the mature liveweight is 550kg but I find it very hard to get Holstein Friesian bulls now that are in that €15 to €20 range for maintenance and have high percentages.”

Last year the herd delivered 460kg MS/cow to Lakeland Dairies from 780kg of meal fed per cow, but with 41% first calvers. The year before the herd did 470kg MS/cow from 700kg of meal. The cows are currently milking 25 to 25.5l per day at 3.77% protein and 4.72% fat which is 2.2kg MS/cow. They are being fed 5kg of meal and the rest in grass and Barry estimates they are eating 14kg to 15kg per day.

The herd is milked once a day in December and for all of February. On cell count, Barry says it went to over 300,000 in late February but is back now at 117,000 after treating two cows after the first milk recording.

Fertiliser

Soil fertility on the milking platform is good, with 80% of the area on target for pH, 80% on target for potash and 75% on target for phosphorus. All of the silage ground on the outside blocks has been spread with 3,000 gallons/acre of slurry and 80 units of nitrogen, ready for first cut in mid-May. Last year’s silage was great quality at 74% DMD.

Half of the grazing block has received around 50 units/acre of nitrogen between slurry and bag fertiliser. The other half has got 30 units/acre applied on 5 March and Eugene was spreading another 30 units/acre on the day of the visit. With enough slurry storage for 200 cows for 22 weeks there is ample storage on the farm so the first of the slurry was spread over the last few weeks by the contractor.

Breeding

A conundrum for Barry is what to do with the maiden heifers this year. Last year they were put in calf by an Angus stock bull. In other years he carried out fixed time AI with CIDR/PRID programme or else served to observed heat for seven days and then injected any heifer not served with prostaglandin and then served them to standing heat.

He says conception rate to both was just over 50%, which he feels is a poor return for the effort and cost involved. Given the herd EBI and demand for dairy replacements, you would expect that there will be a good market for heifers in the coming years.

On the cow side, he installed automated heat detection aid collars in January so the coming breeding season will be his first with the collars on the herd. He has picked a team of 10 bulls, eight of which are sexed semen, and has a team of Hereford, Angus and Belgian Blue bulls picked also. He plans to use the sire advice programme on ICBF to select the cows for dairy and then match the bulls to them.

Barry’s approach is to keep it simple in the run-up to breeding. He doesn’t give any extra minerals to cows and doesn’t plan to do a pre-breeding scan. The only vaccines he uses is black leg vaccine to calves, but he is keeping an eye on diseases through the herd health milk tests.

He will handle any cow calved long enough but not seen bulling before breeding kicks off and will get the vet to scan any problem cows. He says that calving has gone well with few cases of retained cleanings and no milk fevers so is hopeful of a high submission rate this coming breeding season.

With a later start to calving compared to farms down south, it’s still all shoulders to the wheel on the Reilly farm in Cavan. However, with the end in sight Barry and wife Brenda are looking forward to the longer days to spend with Ollie (5), Katie (3) and Sam (8 months).

In brief