All weanlings are still out at grass, but I think by the time you are reading this, I’ll have them in the shed.

There is still a reasonable amount of grass around, but the amount of rain that has fallen over the past few weeks has left ground conditions mediocre at best.

Anyway, the lambs will clean up whatever is left. Since the time changed, I’m running around in the evening with a head light on to feed them their meal.

My better half bought me one of those really bright LED headlights for Christmas last year, which I must say is a great job.

The only problem at the minute is the temperature is so mild, whatever flying insect that’s within a 50-metre radius seems to be congregating on my face - not that overly pleasant.

Time for the shed

Although cattle look well, it's unlikely that big belly fills of wet grass are achieving brilliant performance, so it’s probably time for the shed.

The cows in the shed are getting second-cut baled silage. It has tested well - 73DMD, 36% dry matter and 14% crude protein.

Probably a little too good for dry cows to be fed ad-lib, which I suppose is what’s happening at the min, but better too good than not good enough.

I will hopefully get the pit opened in the next couple of weeks and start targeting allocations a bit better.

First-cut silage hasn’t been tested yet and it’s difficult to know where to estimate it.

It was nice enough grass and was cut in reasonable conditions, but was at least a week later than I would have liked due to bad weather.

Red clover silage

It will be interesting too to see how the red clover silage tests. A rogue cow ripped one of the bales open on me a while back, so I was able to get a bit of a preview.

Dry matter looks good, silage looks quite black in colour, but I think that’s normal enough.

One thing I did notice is that stock seem to really like it. The bales are stacked in the yard and occasionally stock will be walked past them.

The aforementioned rogue cow decided to stand scratching her head on the bales, ripping a hole in one. She then proceeded to eat through the hole making it bigger.

By the time I got her stopped, she had a nice hole made. I gave her a strong talking to, moved her on and taped up the hole.

However, a week or so later when I was walking a different batch of stock past, they proceeded to rip of the patch and start eating again, they were actually fighting with one another to get at it.

Strange enough I thought, I don’t know if they could smell it through the patch but they definitely seemed to be very fond of it. Time will tell - I’ll wait for the scientific evaluation before I get too excited.