Finally the sun has arrived and all cattle are now at grass after a long winter. A process that started in early February was completed this week when the last of the cows were let out, despite the arrival of rain this weekend.

The last three remaining inside were three cows that I weaned ten days ago. All three had heifer calves and with the calves weighing just over 300kg I decided to wean the calves off the cows before the cows got out. This saved me the job of letting them out together only to have to separate them again in a few weeks time and bring the cows home from the out farm.

There are a number of other bull and heifer calves that are heavy enough to wean and I will look at completing this job depending on the amount of grass available over the next month. At the moment I have plenty of grass available for all stock in their separate groups, but if that changes the early autumn calving cows will be weaned. This will allow me to restrict grass to these cows while allowing the weanlings to keep moving on to fresh grass every three to four days.

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I am currently grazing the cattle in three separate groups. The first group consists of cows with bull calves, the second group consists of cows with heifer calves and the third group consists of replacement heifers and weaned cows along with the salers stock bull. The group of cows and heifer calves also has a number of sixteen month old heifers that I will bring to beef along with cows that have been marked for culling this year.

As the farm is made up of three separate grazing blocks, I have to try and allocate enough animals to each block at the beginning of the grazing season so as to minimise the amount of transport involved during the summer months. With each grazing block divided into paddocks and taking weekly grass measurements this is something I have to manage throughout the summer. Once silage fields are cut in early June this will give me some leeway to reduce the size of the three groups.

As bull and heifer calves have been on grass since early February, I took the opportunity this week to give them all a dose for worms. A simple pour on was used so as to reduce the amount of work and stress involved on man and beast. Before their next dose, I intend to take some samples for analysis and dose based on these results. With a bit of luck the results will come back clear and I will have one less job to do this summer.