All cows were dried off here on the farm in Laois by 20 December and we ended up using sealer only on 50% of the cows. We have been using selective dry cow therapy (SDCT) for the last five years and have got on pretty good.

A few years ago, we had two sealer-only cows get mastitis after drying off.

They got very sick with it and it did make us sceptical of SDCT, but I think a bit of dirt must have been pushed up with the sealer.

It just reinforces that you have to be extremely careful at tubing and ensure teats are very clean for sealer only. In the last few years, we have started giving the cows hay a day or two before drying off and for a week or two after.

I think that it is a great job for drying them up, especially when using sealer only.

A week after drying off we had one sick cow and it wasn’t mastitis; it looked like a chill of some sort. The cow health collar flagged her up as urgent and we gave her two injections of antibiotics and she improved straight away. That was something we never had before after drying off, and only for the collar she probably wouldn’t have been noticed as quickly as we weren’t around the yard as much over Christmas.

We also had two cows lose calves since drying off, hopefully that will be the end of that now.

Our production for the year finished up at 555kg MS/cow with 1.3t of meal per cow and 13t DM/ha of grass grown. I am happy with the performance considering the tough weather we had in 2023. Our empty rate was disappointing though, and too high, at 20%.

We sold some more of our cull cows out of the parlour just before Christmas and this bunch averaged €950/head. They were being milked once a day since the start of November. I decided to keep the remaining culls that were not in as good condition as we were being offered €700/head for them.

I think it will cost roughly €200/month/cow to keep them and hopefully in two months’ time they will be worth €500 to €700 more, leaving a profit. Time will tell which was the best way to go.

The last time I wrote this column back in October, I was hoping to keep the in-calf heifers out for another month, but we had to bring them in the following week as the weather got worse and where they were got flooded.

Grass was wasted but they were happier and better off in the shed. I recorded 1,045mm of rain for 2023. It was the wettest year since 2016, when I started recording rainfall.

We actually managed to keep the cows out grazing by day until mid-November and had a closing cover of 850kg DM/ha on 1 December.

We are starting to get ready for calving now and getting vaccines ordered. We will be vaccinating with Rotavec next week. Calving pens and calf sheds will be disinfected again and set up for the arrival of calves. It will be great to see new life around the yard again. The milking parlour will also be power-washed and liners will be changed to start off clean and fresh for the new year.

Profit monitor

I am also starting to put the information in for the profit monitor this week and we will have our discussion group meeting towards the end of the month. I use the cost control planner throughout the year to track how things are going, so it’s not a big job now to input it. It was a tough year on the finances and a massive contrast to 2022, but hopefully the only way is up now.

I would like to wish everyone a happy and healthy new year and hopefully 2024 will be a good year for farming.