This week was scanning week on the farm, with the cows and heifers scanned on consecutive days. We still have a bit of settling down to do after expanding the herd but the scan went well enough overall. We had one group of cows that joined us last spring and calved later than the rest of the herd. This group is still struggling to get over that hurdle and pull their calving date back for next year.

We might give these another check in a month or six weeks to see if the bulls picked any up towards the end of July. This group scanned at almost 30% empty and brought the overall figure for the cows to 10.5%. We will check some of these again though and we should get the overall number down to just under 10%. The heifers scanned at just 2% empty, with over 60% in-calf to first service.

We are extending calf sheds and adding facilities to make room for the new arrivals

The net result is that we should have just over 60% of the herd calving in the first three weeks of the season next spring and over 85% calved by the end of week six. We are extending calf sheds and adding facilities to make room for the new arrivals.

With plenty of feed on hand this year, we will milk on most of the empty cows for the next few months. Anything that scanned in-calf this week, will calve by the end of April so it will be a bare handful of young cows that we might keep on to calve after that date. The rest will be fed on to hopefully go to the factory before Christmas.

Grass growth

Grass is still flying out of the ground this week so we made some more bales and it doesn’t look like it’s time to mothball the mower for the winter yet either. We will probably have to cut some more grass by the end of August to keep everything under control. We normally try not to make any silage later than August but we will see what the rest of the year throws at us.

We got our reseed done and lime and fertiliser out in excellent conditions so hopefully our minimum till experiment will work out. It’s dry ground, so it will need plenty of rain over the next few weeks, but there seems to be enough of that on the forecast to get it kickstarted.

We are extending calf sheds and adding facilities to make room for the new arrivals

We should get to turn on the new milking parlour next week. As with all of these projects, there’s a lot of progress early on, followed by slower days on wiring and figuring out the awkward bits. We have the added complication when building alongside the old machine of the changeover day when we take out the last of the old equipment and fit the new milk pump and receiver at the top of the parlour.

We should see the silage pit extension finished this week as well

It will be great to get the cows and ourselves trained up to this parlour at the quiet time of the year. We should be well settled in by the time we start drying off the herd in November-December and we should get a good opportunity to get the heifers trained up over the winter so we can hit the ground running next spring.

We should see the silage pit extension finished this week as well. This will double the silage storage capacity on the farm and hopefully reduce the number of bales we need to make over the next few years.