We managed to avoid all of the thunderstorms in Clara over the weekend, so the farm remains fully in the grip of a severe drought. There is some rain forecast over the next few days, and hopefully this will give us some reprieve. Grass growth has slowed to 10kg or 15kg in most cases and drier fields have stopped completely.

Any grass that is growing is throwing up stressed stems rather than leaf, so quality isn’t great for milking cows. We have increased feeding from 4kg to 6kg over the weekend, to reduce demand and to make up for the lack of quality in the sward but we’ve managed to hold off feeding silage so far.

If we don’t get significant rain this week, we will be feeding at least 6kg of baled silage in the paddock from next week onwards.

Yield was dropping towards 1.9kg of solids before we increased the meal but it will probably hold now for another week.

If we don’t get significant rain this week, we will be feeding at least 6kg of baled silage in the paddock

We have grazed all of the second-cut silage ground over the last week, which was a great pressure release valve to have available to us. We will get some slurry out on this ground after grazing and hopefully we will get enough rain to get it moving forward again for a later cut.

The heifers are basically grazing standing silage on the out-farm, as the stronger paddocks kept growing to some extent through the drought. We are topping these paddocks behind them to clean them out and they should have enough grass for the next month with this plan in place.

They are well-grown and still thriving away, so this shouldn’t hold them back off their targets too much.

Again, if we get significant rain, we can skip a few of the strongest paddocks for bales and get them back into a normal routine.

Calves

Calves are grazing stronger grass too at the bottom end of the farm. We are supplementing with 1kg or 2kg of concentrate to make up for the lower-quality grass and they seem to be growing well on this diet. Their dosing is up to date so we shouldn’t need them back in the yard until the TB test next month.

They have a crow-proof ad-lib feeder and we top this up three times per week with a bucket of concentrate and let it run out in between feeds to encourage them to take in plenty of grass.

If we get enough rain, we will move them onto some better quality grass and take away the feeder.

We aren’t heavily stocked this year on the farm, so we had hoped to reseed some ground but these plans have been shelved for the moment.

We might look for an opportunity again in the autumn if things turn around.

We’ll just have to hope for some of these big dark clouds that keep passing overhead to hang around for a few hours

The priority over the next few months is to make sure we have enough winter feed in place, and with most of May and June written off, it will be a struggle to produce enough silage across the summer and autumn. The first cut pit won’t last long at full feeding rates across the winter.

Having learned from 2018, we will scan and cull early if necessary in August.

We might have to reduce numbers of in-calf animals coming into the winter to reduce demand further, and we will feed a high proportion of straw and hay in the dry cow diet to stretch silage stocks further over the winter.

After that, we’ll just have to hope for some of these big dark clouds that keep passing overhead to hang around for a few hours and produce some worthwhile downpours.