Finally, we have some good weather to enjoy and grass is responding well to the sun and heat. We’ve fertilised and closed up a third of the grazing ground and we’ve pushed the stocking rate to 4 LU/ha. Growth was 50kg DM/ha last week, so a demand of 56kg DM/ha should be easily carried for the next few weeks. We have some silage or wraps to put in if growth slows again and we can easily take out a paddock, or two, if growth runs ahead.

Calving is almost wrapped up, with only five cows still taking up residence in the calving box. We could put them out in a paddock but it’s easier to manage them and watch them indoors with the camera. We are feeding them some good quality hay and minerals inside, which should give less trouble than a diet of grass outdoors.

Outdoors

We sometimes calve a few outdoors but, even with mineral buckets, the risk of milk fever is a lot higher on spring grass, especially with the bigger, older cows that are left to calve at this stage. They should all be calved by the end of the month and, hopefully, they won’t give too much trouble.

We scanned the rest of the cows at the start of the breeding season on Monday and were happy enough with the results. A few of the later calvers haven’t cycled yet, but are clean and should come around over the next few weeks. There are a few cows that need a washout and a bit of help to get them straightened out but most of the herd are clean and showing good strong heats. We served 10% of the herd on the first day of breeding, so it’s a great start and should help to push the three-week submission rate north of 90%.

We are using some sexed semen on the cows for the first week of breeding. Anything that scanned clean and calved in the first three weeks of calving will be considered for this. We will just use it for the first week or 10 days, so that any repeats will still have a good chance of calving early next spring.

Another benefit from the scanning was to pick out the cows most suitable to try with these expensive straws. Hopefully, we can get near 50% conception with the sexed straws. Anything under 40% will be too low for use in the future.

Text messages

We are finally getting text messages from Glanbia with the litres of milk collected and the total kilos of solids included. The litres collected is useful information for anyone away from the farm for a few days and the total kilos of solids collected makes it very easy to calculate the kilos of solids produced per cow per day. Simply divide the solids figure on the text by the number of days to produce and the number of cows going to the tank. It’s a better measure of a cow’s production than simply the litres per cow.

Most discussion groups are benchmarking using this figure and the herd here is producing 1.82kg of milk solids per cow per day. We’re feeding 2kg of meal for minerals during the breeding season and it’s helping to keep up the production figures, but we have 43% heifers in the herd, which is holding it back.

Overall, we’re happy enough with the level of production. If we brought in fewer heifers and had a more mature herd, we could probably expect 2kg per cow per day.