We got our new collecting yard tank all poured, and it was great to get this done in nice weather with no hardship. I have a new cow roadway to go in to give better access to a few paddocks, and we will use some of what we dug out as the base for this. I would like to get this down to the field and spread before calving, but that will depend on the weather.

We have the cows now separated out into the three cubicle sheds according to their calving dates, with just 12 cows in the late pen due after St Patrick’s Day. We also took the collars off the cull cows and put them on the heifers, a slow and tedious job.

This year’s second cut silage came back with a dry matter digestibility (DMD) of 68%. This will be fed to all dry cows and will be perfect as they are all in good condition. I am still waiting on the mineral analysis to make sure it is low in potassium and won’t increase the risk of milk fever.

I will test the first cut when we reach it in the pit. I retested last year’s second cut, which is in bales, and it came back at 75-76% DMD, so the majority of this will be kept for the calved cows in the spring and also fed to the breeding bulls and cull cows.

We started feeding the dry cow minerals to the earlier calving cows last week. They are getting 150g/head/day dusted on the silage.

All the water troughs out in the paddocks have been drained and ballcocks drained to prevent any frost damage. We have a few stakes to be replaced before the spring and a few big branches to get off fences too.

Work was kept to minimum this week, with the cows fed every second day and cubicles cleaned and limed in the mornings. A few hours had everything done.

Mam and Dad were away recently on a regional committee trip to Madrid with Tirlán. The first farm they visited had 500 Holstein Friesian type animals, with 240 cows milking on the day.

The cows were averaging 43l per day on a diet of top-quality maize silage, alfalfa, 6kg concentrates, and small amounts of straw and grass silage. The cows were milked with four robots and housed in cubicles with open slurry tanks. They are allowed spread slurry any day of the year. There were two full-time staff and two brothers running the farm. They owned 7ha with 3ha covered in sheds. So they are renting a lot of land which is costing €450/ac with water and €200/ac without water, which they said was nearly not worth having.

They also visited the Las Ventas bull ring, which is the largest in Spain and the second largest in the world. Unfortunately the season was over when they were there so they only saw videos of what it’s like with a crowd in it.

One thing I forgot to mention about my recent trip to Brussels was the disease bluetongue. Bluetongue is a massive issue in Belgium, I had heard about it, but hadn’t looked into it in much detail. The farmer problems it causes are horrendous. It causes everything, E-coli mastitis, abortions, lameness. He has lost nearly 10 cows out of 60. Luckily there is a vaccine for it, but he didn’t use it early enough to prevent all of these problems.

But his vet told him it would have been even worse if he had not vaccinated at all. Hopefully this will never affect us in this country, but it will be difficult to keep it away forever I would imagine.

I would like to wish everyone a happy and healthy Christmas and New Year. One of my resolutions will be to take some more time off next year, away from the stresses and challenges of the farm, as there is more to life than farming and I think we forget that sometimes.