Grass growth has dropped back to 46kg of growth this week on Tullamore Farm, leaving grass supplies quite tight for the 110 grazing cows and calves and 15 replacement heifers.

Average farm cover is 518kg/DM/ha, while average cover per cow is 128kg/DM/ha. Demand has dropped back to 57kg/ha, with reseeded paddocks coming back into the rotation.

This will decrease further next week as more paddocks come back into the rotation. The grazing area is stocked at 2844kg/LW/ha or 4.10 LU/ha.

There are just nine days' grass ahead of stock and with this in mind 65 acres was blanket-spread on Tuesday with 27.5 units/CAN/acre.

Two paddocks that were topped have been slow to come back into the rotation and this has added to the grazing pressure.

No more topping will take place until grass growth increases. We have had a thistle problem in a nine-acre reseed completed on 20 April. It was sprayed off with glyphosate prior to reseeding with a minimum till machine but thistles came up after spraying.

It was sprayed with Pastor Trio at a rate of 1 litre/ha, which is the recommended rate for new grass leys. However, the spray has only checked the growth and thistles are back growing again. As this is the only weed present, it will be topped after grazing and sprayed next spring with ThistleX.

The three groups of calves (two suckler and one dairy calf group) were faecal sampled again last week and came back clear.

There was an issue last week with one of the Limousin bulls with a number of repeats.

We have scanned the cows since and fertility-tested the bulls and will cover this in detail in this week’s edition of the Irish Farmers Journal.

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Beef management: Faecal sampling and spraying

Grass growth back on track on the Tullamore Farm