At this point, everyone should have stock out catching up on their percentage grazed. The focus now needs to turn to residuals.

Achieving a residual of 4cm in your first rotation will set the farm up for the year and make grazing in the subsequent rotations a lot easier.

Poorly grazed-out paddocks from the first rotation will have dead material at the base in the second rotation. This will have a lower energy content and forcing cow to graze these down can really reduce the energy intake during the breeding season.

This is why focusing on achieve residuals in your first rotation is so important.

Training

Stock need to be trained to graze paddocks out. The best way of achieving the desired graze out down to 4cm is by getting your grass allocations right.

When training the cows to graze out paddocks, aim to give the cow enough grass for one grazing.

Giving cows a fresh bite of grass every grazing is essential to keep them settled

If you get it wrong and cows get too much grass, which can happen, you need to give cows a much smaller allocation of fresh grass for the following grazing and allow them to go back over previous allocation to clean it off.

Giving cows a fresh bite of grass every grazing is essential to keep them settled and once they have grazed the fresh bit, they will generally go back and graze grass left behind in previous allocations to fill up.

Bad habit

Cows should not be moved during the day - this will give them a bad habit and leave them looking for fresh grass in the middle of the day.

If cows get used to getting fresh grass after each milking, they will wait content in the field until milking, as they know they will get fresh grass afterwards.

This is easy to say, but in practise you may get allocations wrong and leave the cows short of grass and be tempted to give them a bit extra during the day.

However, you’re better off to wait and ensure they get extra grass in the following allocation.

It is a fine balance in making sure cows are been fully fed and achieving your residuals

It is a fine balance in making sure cows are been fully fed and achieving your residuals.

Pre-breeding, it's important that the cow energy requirements are being met.

However, achieving residuals in the first rotation will also ensure cows are going into high-quality grass during the breeding season, which will really have a positive affect on fertility.

Allocations will need to be adjusted as numbers and intakes are still increasing.

Calculating cows' intakes can be done by measuring a paddock before grazing. Then after grazing, divide the total grass DM that was available by the number of cows and number of days the cows were grazing the paddock, giving you the total DM of grass they are eating per day.