It feels like the calm before the storm this week with plenty of cows springing up and a few starting to move into the calving shed, but no new arrivals in the calf pens yet.

The calf sheds are almost ready at this stage, with the last bit of tidying up and disinfecting to be done this week. Most of the supplies are in for the calving season, the tags were delivered a few weeks ago, the calving camera is working and vaccinations are up to date. Hopefully all the preparation will help everything run smoothly when the fun starts.

We will have a separate shed for the bull and heifer calves that are for sale. The target is to keep 100 heifer calves with the rest sold as soon as possible. All the ones for keeping will be reared on the automatic feeder with milk powder.

We will do the opposite with the bulls, with around 40 registered as bulls and a hundred or so sold to local beef farmers. We have an office now in an old shed in the farmyard to help the paperwork with transfers to run as smoothly as possible.

We are starting the year with a great cover of grass on the farm after the mild winter and the big question now with the mild weather continuing is how soon to go out with some fertiliser and what product to spread. Urea seems to be in short supply locally and where available, the price has been pushed up to reflect this.

CAN is more freely available and the price per unit of nitrogen is coming closer all the time, so we will get as many prices in as possible and try to go with the best option.

Our new slurry store has plenty of capacity so we are not under pressure to spread this yet and with the amount of grass on the farm, we will hold off a bit longer and maybe follow the cows with slurry in February.

If the weather holds, cows will go out to grass as soon as they calve. We have maize silage to buffer them at grass, but we will graze aggressively enough at the start to try to rejuvenate some of the heavy covers that have been carried through the winter.

Roadways

We have cleaned off some of the roadways and will top dress them before the cows start using them in a week or so. The cows’ feet are starting the season in good shape after some extra effort over the dry period, so hopefully we can keep them in that condition for the long grazing season ahead. We will continue to footbathe them regularly through the spring to try to keep on top of any disease issues.

We had some problems with pink-eye in our weanling heifers this winter which caused a bit of extra work. We are on top of it at this stage, with a batch of them treated every week for the month of January.

It doesn’t seem to have affected their thrive too much and hopefully we will have it cleared up before they go back out to grass in a few weeks’ time.

The other main issue at the moment is whether or not to sign up to another fixed milk price scheme with Glanbia. Of the two schemes available at the moment, the three-year scheme looks like the more attractive option. Markets in New Zealand are levelling off a bit and with co-op support pulled back out of the Glanbia price, maybe it’s time to be careful rather than brave.