With all land now back in the grazing rotation, grass covers are starting to build nicely for the autumn.

Every paddock has received some sort of chemical fertiliser over the past week.

I had a little 18.6.12 left over ,which was targeted on ground known to have low P and K indices.

The rest of the ground received a pasture sward-type product.

I have 27 days of grass ahead of me according to the plate meter.

Ground conditions have deteriorated a bit over the past two weeks as there has been quite a lot of heavy rain.

Stock need to be moved on a little quicker than I’d like but I’m still managing to get reasonably good cleanouts.

However, next week’s forecast is looking promising, so hopefully ground conditions will improve.

We also managed to get all farmyard manure spread during the last week as well.

We had intended to spread it over the ground that had been cut for second-cut silage, but by the time we managed to get round to actually spreading it, the cover of grass on this ground was just too strong.

Plan B had to be implemented and we spread it on land that was just recently grazed.

All the manure was spread on the one field for convenience, which meant it was probably applied slightly heavier than intended, but again this land is slightly low in P and K so it will do no harm.

Weaning

I’ve also started to wean calves and all bull calves are weaned at this point.

I put the cows into the shed and fed them on straw.

The calves were put into an adjacent pen but also had access back out to a paddock with good grass. They were able to walk in and out as they pleased.

They were fed meal out at grass and would come in and lie beside the cows at night.

After 24 hours I caught the cows in the head lockers and let the calves in to suckle them. I did the same after another 36 hours. Hopefully this will help reduce any mastitis.

After five days the cows were put back to grass, out to a paddock that was partly grazed but had a reasonable amount of stemmy grass, and the calves were closed into the paddock that they were in.

One mistake that I have made is the paddock the cows are in and the paddock the calves are in are too close together.

They can’t really see each other but they can hear and smell each other so there is still a bit of loud communicating going on.