Lack of grass means I am feeding bales and zero grazing

Grass has got very tight here in Abbeyleix. The last two growth rates were 45kg and 52kg DM/ha, giving a cover per cow of 123kg/cow and 136kg/cow.

With demand of 60kg DM/ha on grass and 4kg of nuts, farm cover was only going to go one way without extra supplement.

We have only had 27mm of rain in June and that is restricting things now. I know it’s better than too much rain, but we could have done with a good main growing season after the past year of challenging weather.

When I saw the growth of 45kg two weeks ago, I started zero-grazing the red clover fields, which were ideal for zero-grazing as they were three weeks since being baled.

We got a week out of that and went in with four bales per day in the paddocks, with the bale unwinder. I was allowing approximately 7kg DM/ha from the zero-grazing and the four bales per day. This reduced our demand to 35kg DM/ha.

We were grazing covers of around 900kg to 1,000kg DM/ha and I thought this would slow the cows up enough, but it didn’t.

The paddocks that were coming next to be grazed had covers of 800kg DM/ha and under, so I decided to hold the cows on a paddock beside the yard on all silage and nuts for a few days to let grass get ahead.

We are putting the eight bales of silage per day at the feeding barriers with the cows locked out from the cubicles and going out to the field to lie down.

I decided not to increase the nuts from 4kg as we have a lot of silage and I wanted to try to keep the cost down a bit.

Protein went up to 3.67% when we had nice aftergrass, but that was shortlived as it had dropped back to 3.56% with the four bales of silage.

Hopefully it doesn’t drop much more now on full silage. The bales are excellent quality but, as we know, nothing compares to grass.

Milk yield has also dropped back to between 24l and 25l, but there is nothing we can do about it as the weather dictates the grass growth.

On the plus side, the somatic cell count (SCC) has dropped back to between 100,000 and 120,000 for the last few collections, which is good.

I rechecked the two cows I had treated with garlic tubes with the California Milk Test (CMT) and one was cured but one was not. I gave her antibiotic tubes and hopefully that will cure her. We also had two cows with clinical mastitis in the last two weeks, so we gave them antibiotic tubes.

We gave her an antibiotic injection on Thursday and Friday, and she was back to normal by Friday evening

The collars showed up a cow off-form last Thursday, with reduced eating and ruminating.

We gave her an antibiotic injection on Thursday and Friday, and she was back to normal by Friday evening.

We also have one very lame cow that we are keeping near the yard and only milking once a day. She had a stone stuck in her hoof which led to an infection and it is taking a long time for her to fully recover and the foot is still very sore.

I got the seven acres we are going to reseed sprayed off and subsoiled last week.

Hopefully we will get it sowed this week or next week. I always subsoil when we are reseeding as I think it has to be excellent for the ground for aeration and compaction.

Our method of reseeding is to disc it two or three times, power harrow it, roll it, power harrow and sow it and roll again. We have put 3,000 gallons/acre of slurry on it for the P and K, as we have no chemical P allowance. I will also spread two bags/acre of gran lime to help burn off the sod.

Breeding

Breeding looks to be going very well with only six repeats in the last 10 days and, according to HerdApp, we have a 69% conception to the first serve, which would be our best in a long time. The last few years it has even slipped to around 50%, but scanning this week will clarify how it’s going.

Usually the mid-scan does show up some embryonic deaths, but hopefully this year we will have only one or two or better still none.

The solar panels seem to be a very good job so far.

Around 60% to 80% of our electricity usage is now coming from solar, and on top of that we are exporting over 50% of the power we produce, most days. So if we can start getting paid for the export, it would all be a great saving on the electricity bill.