The last week or two of heavy rain hammered home the nails on grazing 2023, as farmers in many areas had no option but to keep shed doors firmly shut.

All in all, it’s surprising we got this far with grazing, given the atrocious year.

Average farm covers on dairy farms is sitting a little over 700kg DM/ha, with drystock farms around the 630kg DM/ha mark.

Each of them are a little on the high side, especially with soil temperatures 1°C to 2°C above normal, indicating that November growth will be above normal and a low farm demand (with stock housed) could lead to a higher than optimal opening cover come next spring.

Utilising light stock

Where possible, grazing should still resume in some form, likely through on-off grazing or with lighter stock (calves, weanlings or sheep) to try being covers down closer to the 600kg mark for drystock farms and lower stocked dairy farms and 650kg of a cover for more heavily stocked dairy farms by the end of the month.

If significant damage is being done, then grazing should be halted, but if the opportunity presents to get some covers off paddocks (particularly heavy covers that will rot at the base if left over the winter), then an effort should be made to graze these.

It’s now also a good time on farms to assess individual paddock performance and highlight paddocks that should be reseeded.

While older swards will generally perform similar to new pastures in the middle of the grass season, at the shoulders of the year the performance of these swards will dip significantly.

Paddocks that have failed to recover well after their final grazing should be firstly soil sampled to identify a possible soil fertility issue and then reseeded once fertility has been corrected.