The soil moisture deficit over the summer has been swept away completely by damp and wet conditions over the last few weeks. We might even be moving towards a surplus of moisture this week, with cows starting to leave an impression behind them in each paddock that they graze.

Thankfully these paddocks will have a big rest now until the spring as we move into the final grazing rotation of the year and start to close up paddocks for early grazing.

Growth

Grass growth has been excellent through September, so we’ve made up for a lot of lost ground over the summer and we’ve built up a cover of 1,200kg DM/ha for the last grazing rotation.

Cows are still on 3kg of concentrate to try to keep milk flowing well into the autumn and milk solids have taken a huge jump over the last month as grass covers have risen to target levels.

The big challenge now, with the inclement weather is to keep these higher covers grazed out properly, to keep quality right through the winter.

On the outfarm, the in-calf heifers seem very content with high covers in front of them as well. We will start to strip-graze them through the final rotation to protect re-growths. They are in excellent condition and growing well still.

With a bit of luck, we should be able to keep them out for another two months now and shorten the winter as much as possible.

The weanling calves on the other hand, are a little more unsettled this year for some reason. They also need to get fresh grass every day from now on, but more to keep them settled than anything.

Their appetites are increasing every day as they grow, so we will see how they get on through the rest of the autumn, but they are definitely putting their hands up for early housing.

They have plenty of grass in front of them for this month but we will probably bring them in at the beginning of November and leave the older girls out a bit longer.

Research visit

Off farm, we had a great visit to the Lyons Estate Research Farm with the local Friesian Breeders club this week.

We got an excellent briefing on the ongoing research and trial work on the farm, and on what the farm is hoping to achieve by pioneering a higher input research herd for the farms where that system works best.

It’s great to get out and see something different on farm, and apart from seeing a highly productive and well managed herd hitting all of it’s production targets, there were some excellent side-projects going on.

There were very interesting trials on multispecies swards. These were being conducted with beef cattle on both ryegrass swards and multispecies swards.

Excellent performance

It’s a multi-year project, with good results from the cattle on the multispecies treatment and our eyes were opened a lot with the excellent performance figures from the cattle on the multispecies swards.

We were even more impressed when we got to see the cattle side by side on the two treatments.

Safe to say the young-stock around here will be eating at least some more chicory and plantain over the next few years, and hopefully we can get similar results on our own farm before rolling it out across more ground.

The reduced fertiliser usage, heavier and healthier stock and huge bio-diversity improvements were too good to ignore. Thanks to the UCD team for their generosity with their time.