Mother Nature is once again proving that the idealistic notion of calendar farming dreamt up by a bunch of invisible bureaucrats has no place here in the real world. Such restrictive regulation must be frustrating for anyone who’s at or near full slurry capacity.

Luckily, there is still plenty of slurry storage here even if it means having to transfer slurry between tanks. The weather has also put a stop to any thoughts of shaking some early nitrogen not only because the land is saturated but also because soil temperatures are only about 5oC here and are unlikely to rise significantly until the soil gets a chance to dry out. Put simply, the air heats up faster than water.

The plan is to get slurry out on bare ground when conditions improve and spread half a bag of urea on the rest.

Hopefully, that opportunity will materialise before the month is out. The good news is that fertilizer prices look to be back slightly on last year – fingers crossed, this is a trend that will continue.

EARMARKED

Hopefully this spring will deliver reasonable growth and some decent grazing conditions. The first cattle earmarked for turnout are the lightest bull and heifer yearlings. These have the best potential to turn early grass into euros without excessively damaging swards.

The calving is progressing steadily, with no complications yet lots of bulls. In fact, it’s running at a ratio of over two bulls to every heifer calf on the ground. As fate would have it, every single bull calf born so far is sired by a maternal bull but with no problems or losses, yet I’m not complaining.

Next week, I intend to start the older calves on twice-a-day sucking to help encourage any cows that haven’t started cycling yet as the beginning of the breeding season is now just around the corner.

Twice-a-day sucking has worked well here in the past for both the cow and the calf. When housed some calves can get thievish, sucking multiple cows which affect any shy feeders.

Usually, it’s only practised while stock are housed but after last year’s spring, it was also used on the tail-enders too with good results.

Booster vaccinations for lepto and BVD have been given to the maiden heifers and all the calved cows also. Although the chances of BVD infection are reducing due to the AHI eradication programme, it is still a threat and after witnessing the destruction that a BVD outbreak is capable of doing to a naive herd, I’m taking no chances.

The fact that some herd owners are continuing to hold on to known Persistently Infected (PI) animals is beyond comprehension.

Do these people realise that not only are they showing disregard for their own livestock but they are also putting their neighbours’ herds at risk too? This highly infectious disease is extremely simple to eradicate.

Once all PIs have been removed, the disease is gone. There’s no cross infection from other species, no reservoir of disease in wildlife. The disease needs PIs to survive; no PIs means no more BVD.

Keeping PIs is holding the whole country’s herd to ransom. As we know, there is a ban on selling PI animals. Should any herds containing PIs be locked up similar to regulations for TB?

After all, any animal leaving that herd has the potential to carry the disease with them through urine, faeces or a transitory infection. Is this the level of restriction that will be required to convince a small number of herd owners that they are undermining the good work of the majority of farmers?

BVD is costing farmers millions each year through loss of efficiency, thrive and higher veterinary costs – the sooner we get rid of it the better.