Drying off has started on the Greenfield Farm in Kilkenny. The first 25 cows were pulled out of the herd on Friday and another 30 will be selected for drying on Monday. The procedure on this farm is they get a tube and sealer. This year Cepravin dry cow tubes and Boviseal sealer are being used. It’s a cost of €10.50 per cow, but the protection, cure and seal the combination gives have worked well for the last number of years.

The winter housing situation for dry cows on this farm is topless cubicles and then on to a woodchip stand-off pad as they approach calving. There is a greater chance of infection compared with the setup in most Irish herds that in the majority are housed indoors on cubicles that are limed and cleaned down twice a day. For this reason, barriers to infection on this leased farm must be created to minimise infection.

Relatively dry weather means grazing continues but the diet is supplemented with silage and meal. Top-class round bale silage and meal at 3kg per head per day is being fed. It’s a cost, but the trade-off is that available grass on the farm is stretched out for as long as possible. Growth rates are good and the farm is looking very well.

Grass more valuable next spring

Any paddocks that could possibly be grazed again this autumn will probably not be grazed. Why? Because they are more valuable next spring on this farm for freshly calved cows. You can almost guarantee on this farm that it will be possible to get cows out next February as ground conditions are better here than on heavy soil farms.

On heavy soil farms, March grass might be a bonus so it might be worth grazing what you can now.

While a lot of feed has gone into the diet over the last number of wet weeks (silage bales and meal), in general cows are in very good condition score. The herd was condition-scored during the week and there are only very few are under 2.75 on the 1 to 5 scale.

Most of the mature cows are in good order (3.5 plus). It’s the first-calved heifers that need priority care at this time of the year as they come to the end of their first lactation.

The herd is still milking around 12kg per day and the last milk test result is the same as reported last weekend: 5.92% fat and 4.12% protein with 4.69% lactose and 310 SCC. No other test result came through during the week.

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