Trainee farm manager Micheal O’Sullivan is working on John McNamara’s dairy farm in Limerick. I caught up with Micheal yesterday to see how things were going on this spring calving dairy farm in the heart of the Golden Vale.

Micheal says grass is absolutely flying it, just like the Limerick hurlers. They grew 101kg per day for the past seven days and the biggest challenge at the minute is to stop grass going too strong. When I spoke to Micheal last week, he had skipped over paddocks and brought his cover per cow back to 125kg per cow, which I thought was a bit on the low side but after doing the grass walk this week, Micheal had a cover of 220kg per cow, vindicating his decision.

So to get this back to the desired range of 150 to 180kg per cow, more paddocks were skipped over. As it stands now, cover per cow is at 166kg, stocking rate is at 3.37 and demand is 54kg per day – meaning more surpluses will emerge soon.

Silage was cut on this farm over two weeks ago and already they are back grazing re-growths with calves. While the covers are low at around 500kg, there is a lot of area to be grazed and it is growing really fast so will be at 1,000kg by early next week, says Micheal. The fields that were cut for silage got 3,500 gallons of slurry per acre plus 30 units of nitrogen per acre.

Calves were dosed last week with a white drench. They also got a mineral bolus and they were injected for blackleg. These are on 1.25kg of meal per head per day and are grazing aftergrass.

Like the rest of the second-year Professional Diploma in Dairy Farm Management students, Micheal was back in college for two days last week. They had an exam in Moorepark and visited Bill O’Keefe’s farm in Conna on Thursday and then went to visit the Greenfield farm in Kilkenny on Friday.

Back on the farm, Micheal says a decision needs to be made this week about the docks in the after-grass. He says the narrow-leafed docks are just at the right time for spraying now, but adds if he does spray now he will have to leave them for seven days before grazing, at which point the grass will be gone nearly too strong. He’s hoping that the cows will graze some of them and then perhaps spray the rest after grazing.