This autumn has been a disaster here for building grass covers. We were suffering from a soil moisture deficit and under any trees the grass had nearly died out. We have got enough rain now to counteract this, but this has brought much cooler temperatures. So I can’t see us getting a boost in growth at this stage. Our cover is now at 800kg DM/ha with a growth rate last week of 50kg DM/ha. We are feeding four bales per day, with demand down to 27kg DM/ha. I might up the nuts another 1kg to 5kg in the next week, as cows are still milking well at between 20-22l, to try and keep them up for as long as possible. Protein is at 4.10% and butterfat is at 5.10%. The protein went up to 4.25% on the new grass reseeds, and the fat dropped to 4.77%. This shows the difference grass quality has on performance.

The collars also show up alerts for the cows when we go into the new reseeds, as their rumination decreases on the lush grass.

We have started the autumn rotation planner now and cows are on new breaks after each milking, with two bales in the field. We are allocating 0.9ha/day. We are going into covers of 1,400-1,500kg DM/ha, and if we can hold it like this for the next few weeks, it won’t be too bad.

Our milk recording results came back and this time only one cow had an somatic cell count (SCC) above 1,000,000. When I completed the California Mastitis Test on her, she was actually okay and the overall SCC is still under 100,000. I will check her again a few times to see does a quarter flare up. Dad got the harvest all wrapped up, with combines cleaned down and put away for another year. He was happy with how the spring barley turned out in the end. It all went for distilling, last year none went for malting. He has all straw sold and delivered too, with catch crops now in the ground as well. The mustard he sowed after the winter barley was 4ft tall, so he topped that at the weekend to have it decaying before ploughing. Some of the mustard he didn’t get sowed for two weeks after the main bit, as there was still straw in a field, and the later sown mustard was only 1ft tall. That really shows the power of two weeks’ July growth versus August.

Scanning

We scanned a few cows that showed up doubtful on the collars on Monday. We had six cows I knew were empty, there were three I didn’t serve, and out of the 20 we scanned there were five more empty. So 9.5% were empty out of what was served. I am delighted with this, as it was my first year doing the AI myself and over the last three years our empty rate has been around 20%. It would look like our high empty rate over the last few years was indeed down to not vaccinating the cows for Leptospirosis. Our Teagasc adviser flagged to me last year that it could be the problem. I still have to re-scan some heifers, and we will do this when they come back to the home yard. They only have a few weeks grass ahead of them and they will be in for the winter then. There has been some activity with these, so hopefully there’s no more than two empty.

I was at the open day in Tirlán, Ballyraggett, last week. It was nice to get the opportunity to visit the factory and get a tour of where our milk goes and what it produces. It is an extremely well-run site, with a lot of different moving parts. It is very impressive that there are rarely any breakdowns or delays for milk intake. It was very interesting to see the vast range of products that are made from our milk. There are a lot more products than most of us realised.

The cow is a great animal to provide so much employment and such a diverse range of nutritional products. We probably could be getting a few cent per litre more, looking at all the “value-add” products produced, was a comment made by some farmers on the day.