Grass+: focus now on building grass

Grass growth this week averaged 77kg/day around the country, leaving plenty of grass on most farms.

Pre-grazing yields are starting to creep up over 1,500kg/ha. While this may be necessary to build grass it’s important not to let the focus on achieving good graze-outs slip. How you graze out paddocks in the autumn will set up grass quality for the following year.

Be selective on paddocks you graze at higher covers. Paddocks cut for surplus bales or aftergrass from second-cut silage are more suitable to carry higher covers as it is all new fresh leaf.

Farmers stocked below 2.75Lu/ha or on heavy soils still have an opportunity to remove surpluses but these should be taken as soon as possible.

The average farm cover (AFC) on these farms should not exceed 1,100kg/ha and given that they will be building grass until the end of September, the AFC should be around 500kg/ha to 600kg/ha now.

For those farmer stocked at 3.0Lu/ha and higher, an average farm cover of 750kg/ha is the target for mid-August. A plan should be put in place to build covers to reach the target AFC of 1,100 to 1,200kg/ha with minimum supplementation.

PastureBase’s grass budget is the best way to do this, giving you a week-by-week over view taking growth rates, supplementation and stock numbers into account.

Teagasc Ballyhaise, Co Cavan

Grass is flying it here and we can’t see growth falling below 70kg/day in the next week so we dropped the AFC down to 488kg/ha. Surplus grass was taken out on Tuesday which will hopefully be the last this year. The farm is very clean with a lot of aftergrass to come. This will help us keep hitting the target residuals of 4cm or less. We will aim to build to 1,250kg/ha at peak, with building starting now. We’re not afraid of a high AFC as long as I have the heavy covers in the right places.

Behy Beg, Co Mayo

Growth is a lot higher than we thought it would be leaving us with more grass than expected this week. However, I am slow to take out a paddock for bales as growth tends to drop off quickly here in the west. The plan is to leave a paddock aside and strip graze it in September. This will help manage grass quality and keep average farm cover on track. We are targeting an AFC of 1,050kg/ha. We have a high stocking rate and high six-week calving rate in spring but can’t build to the 1,200kg as it’s hard to graze high covers when it turns wet in the backend.

Watergrasshill, Co Cork

We took out 8ha this week due to the burst of growth. This leaves our stocking rate artificially high at 3.35 but will be back down to 2.9Lu/ha next week. Our plan is to build to a cover of 1,250kg/ha by mid-September. This will give us enough grass to graze until mid- to late November with a target closing cover of 750kg/ha. We have fed 350kg of meal/cow to date. Our target for the year is 550kg/cow and this leaves us 200kg to feed between now and the end of the year. We plan to feed no silage in October. October grazing will set up the farm for the spring so achieving a high grazing percentage is vital.