What a spell of weather there has been. Temperatures have been soaring and we have even had a few showers of rain to keep the grass growing. And it certainly has been growing.

This year, we are pushing the grass to see just how much we can get from it, so we started some heifers grazing in late March. We had planned to be a couple of weeks earlier, but the weather held us up, so we got them out on 27 March – once conditions were right.

With our normal turnout being around 10 May, we managed to shave about six weeks off their turnout. In comparison with keeping them in the shed, we have saved around £1,200 of feeding and bedding on them. In the middle of April, we followed them with 15 cows and calves, giving us more feeding and bedding savings of around £900.

Saving

With over £2,000 saved this spring, earlier turnout will definitely feature going forward. We did have to house the cows and calves again for one night during the cold wet snap at the beginning of May, but after that they have never looked back.

We have most of the stock on grazing rotations, with most of them working on a field-by-field basis with no need for fences to split them up. The only extra fencing we have done is to split a 7ha field into three sections and a 4ha field into two sections. These five sections form the grazing rotation for 35 cows.

First cut

We cut our first-cut silage at the end of last week and because grass growth has been as strong as it has, we also took out two of the rotational grazing sections for silage. We are making higher-quality silage this year to reduce our winter feed costs, as last year’s silage was 10ME and 8% crude protein, and we had to feed a fair bit of concentrates to the cows and growing cattle to make up the shortfall.

In total, we got 382 bales, with over 100 bales coming from the 4.5ha of grazing land. The rest came from the dedicated silage fields, and at 280 bales from 12.5ha, we were a little disappointed with the yield. We have aerated these fields and have applied another 60kg of nitrogen for second cut on one field and the other is hopefully going to be hay – if we can get the weather at the time.

The two sections of rotational grazing that we took are rejoining their rotation, and the cows and calves will be back grazing them again in a couple of weeks once they have had a chance to regrow.