About 100 farmers attended Tuesday’s Teagasc spring grazing beef farm walk in the Derrypatrick herd in Grange research farm. The event focused around three areas – early grazing management, spring fertiliser application and the spring rotation planner.

Looking at early grazing management first, project leader Adam Woods of Teagasc said that with the herd having such a high stocking rate of 2.7 LU/ha, it is critical that grassland management starts the season off on the right note.

Closing paddocks in rotation last autumn, strong growth during November and above-normal growth during December left the farm in a good position with an opening cover of 1,070kg DM/ha. This provided an excellent opportunity to get stock out early but unfortunately persistent inclement weather has limited the farm from achieving this goal.

Some weanlings were turned to grass on 24 February. Adam explains: “We went out with our stock last week, we have targets to hit and need to have 40% of our ground grazed by St Patrick’s Day to be fully round by 12 April (first rotation). We are already behind target on that so we really need to push on and get covers grazed”.

As the farm is behind target getting stock out and grass grazed, a different approach has been taken to ensure the first rotation planner stays on track. More importantly, the target is that grass will be available at the start of the second rotation.

“If you look at our wedge, we are grazing our lighter covers first – that’s to speed up our rotation a bit. If we go to the heavy covers it will take us a long time to get through them so that is why we are on the middle portion of covers,” says Adam. “These covers received urea at 23 units per acre last Thursday. Lighter covers got slurry on Saturday and our heavier covers, we will actually graze them first and then go with slurry on them. So, it’s all about working to those targets and trying to keep stock out if we can over the next couple of weeks and creating this wedge that sets us up for the next rotation.”

It may look bad today, but after a few days when the rain washes that off we’ll move on

Cattle turned out settled quickly and while ground was tricky in places, swards were still being grazed satisfactorily. However, 14mm of rain on Monday night deteriorated ground conditions for Tuesday’s farm walk, with Adam explaining that if rain continues cattle may need to be rehoused.

“To be honest the damage is quite superficial. It may look bad today, but after a few days when the rain washes that off (clay soiled grass) we’ll move on. The big thing is not to damage those paddocks again so we’ll definitely try and graze these in a dry time again so we don’t damage them twice. We’ll probably take a little hit maybe in terms of growth for a few weeks but it’s a balancing act between trying to get paddocks grazed off and not damaging too much.”

The paddock system is being used to underpin this goal and back fences are also being utilised to reduce damage. If ground remains difficult and excessive damage is threatened stock will be rehoused, a prospect Adam is not over concerned about. “We came in and out four times last year between 19 February and 18 May. Our stock didn’t take a hit during that time and we needed to be that flexible to minimise the amount of damage. In terms of costs, we have shown here today that there is a threefold decrease from having stock out grazing as opposed to feeding them inside.”

We will have further updates on the Derrypatrick Herd in the coming weeks.