The heavy rain on Thursday night and Friday really put a spanner into the grazing works.

With up to 40mm of rain falling in a matter of hours, on top of heavy rain earlier in the week, many soils are now saturated.

Farmers have had no choice but to house stock en masse, either for the short or long term.

Youngstock will do a lot of damage in this type of weather, while dairy cows can do damage too, particularly during the worst of the weather.

Short periods

With only weeks left in the grazing season, housing cows for short periods such as this and then planning to let them out again when weather or ground conditions improve makes sense.

Farmers on drier land are fortunate that nearly all classes of stock can remain outdoors, with grass availability a bigger issue than ground conditions.

Grass growth rates continue to be better than normal, with many farms growing in excess of 30kg/ha/day.

When to pull the plug on grazing because of grass supply all depends on how much grass is actually on the farm.

Target

Most farmers target to have a closing cover of 600kg to 800kg/ha by 1 December.

To achieve this, it is possible that farm cover can go lower now in the expectation that it will increase quickly when stock are taken and there is no demand.

We can probably expect that growth rates this November will be 20kg per day on average in the first two weeks of November and 15kg per day for the last two weeks.

Therefore, if cows are housed on 10 November, it’s feasible that average farm cover will increase by 350kg/ha before 1 December.