Farmer Writes: preparing for the storm, calving and grazing

When I first sat down to write this, we were still waiting patiently for the beast from the east and Storm Emma to arrive.

He was a very slow-moving beast, but when he arrived, he hit hard.

Every weather forecaster in the country was hyped up like a four-year-old on Smarties forecasting doom and gloom and the worst snow storm in 40 years – and we can see why.

However, I don’t know where they were all hiding two weeks ago when they missed the inch of rain that fell around here with no warning one Friday night.

Bread and milk

If their aim was to drive demand for bread and milk through the roof for a few days, then mission accomplished in all the local shops in Kilkenny at least.

Maybe everyone is planning to leave out bread and milk for this beast to try to keep him happy. We may even have to start eating cake around here if things get too bad or it lasts for too long.

Hopefully it won’t be too bad though in all seriousness and hopefully farms won’t be too badly affected.

We might get a heavy fall of snow on Thursday night around here but with a bit of luck it might be thawed by the weekend.

Salt and ice

We are well prepared anyway and have some salt at the ready for any icy patches around the yard. We’ll also try to keep the yard cleared before it gets too compacted after the fun we had driving around on compacted snow and ice for two weeks in 2010.

We have over 75% of the herd calved this week and we should hit 85% calved by the end of the first six weeks of calving.

The calves on the automatic feeder are thriving well so hopefully this cold snap doesn’t upset things too much.

We are leaving a tap on at the feeder when the temperature drops to keep water flowing to it so hopefully that will be enough to keep everything working.

Grazing

The cows have been out grazing full-time for the last week, with ground conditions improving by the hour in the harsh dry east wind.

Clean-outs are excellent but grass growth is minimal and it looks like continuing like that for the foreseeable future, so we are feeding 5kg of concentrate and around the same in dry matter of maize silage to the milking herd.

We will continue to feed them well during the cold and hopefully milking won’t be disrupted too much.

We have fertiliser and slurry spread but I think we’ll need to have a lot of patience waiting for it to have any effect in these temperatures.

Growth

Hopefully the weather event doesn’t last too long and maybe, as the saying goes, “March might go out like a lamb” and growth might bounce back significantly towards the second half of the month.The maiden heifers are still in the shed until this weather warning passes. We had intended moving them out to grass this week but with the forecast as bad as it is they will have to put up with a diet of silage for a few more days.

The ground that they are going out o is dry enough, so we will hopefully get them out early next week.