Super growth but wet silage in the south east

This week we grew 87kg a day, bringing our cover to 646kg per hectare and a cover of 210kgs per cow. Grass growth is still very high and seems it will keep up for another few weeks yet. Over the weekend we got a lot of heavy rain. Friday was very wet, along with Saturday night and showers on Sunday.

This week we cut our second-cut silage. In June we were hoping we would be able to sell it, but in the end we could not get anyone for it so we decided to pit it. We used a silage slab in one of our lease blocks as the pits on our home farm are completely full.

We mowed Wednesday and hoped to pick up Friday but like a lot of people, we got caught in the rain, which did not let up until Saturday. We had no choice but to pick it up so are expecting a nice bit of run off to come out of the pit.

Back to zero meal

On the cow front, we fed the cows 1.5 kgs of meal in the wet weather but we are now back to zero meal as our cover per cow is still over 200kg. They are currently doing 20 litres per day at 3.66% protein and 4.10% butterfat, which we are happy about. I seem to have taken control of the somatic cell count again, as it is hovering around 120-130k in recent collections. I'm reasonably happy with that – and no sign of clots anymore.

Last week, we changed all liners and pulse tubes in the pit and also got the machine tested and serviced to make sure that all our basis are covered. We also have changed teat spray, moving from Virolac that we mixed ourselves to pre-mixed Virolac.

Emptying the slurry tank

This week we hope to empty the last of the slurry and dirty water onto the silage ground we cut and we will then spread 60 kgs of ASN on that ground as that was the only part of the grazing block that did not get it at the start of the year.

Other jobs to be done will be to draft out the groups of calves again, keeping the biggest ones together and leaving the smallest ones near the grazing block as the largest ones will be going to our lease block 20 minutes away on all after grass. There should be 60 calves in this group.

Maintenace is all that is left to do then, with all other major jobs done at the end of July.

Ciaran Fogarty is a second year Professional Diploma in Dairy Farm Management student. He is working on the farm of Adrian Casey, Kilmacthomas, Co Wateford.