In Rathkeale, Co Limerick, Philip Ruttle is flying it. He will have 10% of the farm grazed by the weekend and had 67% calved on Thursday. He has been on/off grazing since the first cows calved on 22 January.

Like many farms in the midwest, Philip’s farm has varying soil types but he is concentrating grazing on the drier parts where less damage will be done.

That being said, it doesn’t always work out and damage was done on Monday and Tuesday night’s grazings. Standing on the farm roadway, the damage looked minimal, but walking through it, poaching was evident and holes were left throughout the field. In my view, it was more damage than I’d be comfortable with.

“It’s more than I’d like, and I do my best to avoid it, but some damage is unavoidable if you want to get cows out early. I live with it though, as I know it’s only a very small proportion of the farm and it will heal in time," Philip says.

Apart from those two small areas, the rest of the grazing was superb, with a cover of about 200kg back on the earliest-grazed sections already. Philip only started milking cows about five years ago, having converted from beef farming.

He is milking twice a day and cows go to grass twice a day. He starts milking at around 7.30am and holds the cows in the yard, without silage until about 9.30-10am. While they’re in the yard, he goes off and sets up the wire for that morning’s break.

Depending on the weather and ground conditions, he brings them back into the yard either side of dinner.

Between then and the evening milking at around 3.15pm they get a small pick of silage, depending on what’s in front of the feed face. Cows go out after milking and are brought back in again at around 6pm. They normally have silage in front of them at night, but he says that it’s always gone by morning.

Philip is milking around 80 cows on his 34ha milking platform. He hosted a Grass10 spring grass farm walk on Thursday.

His opening average farm cover, at 658kg/ha is a little lower than he’d like and because silage is scarce he is feeding 5kg of meal per cow now.

But he is throwing everything at growing grass. Hitting his grazing targets of 30%-grazed by 4 March will automatically increase the amount of grass grown by the start of the second rotation in the first week of April.

He also has 100% of the farm spread with urea or slurry. He got the slurry spread with an umbilical system and dribble bar. Philip plans to go again with fertiliser in early March.

If the weather is suitable and depending on the field and its soil test results, he will either spread 2bags/ac of 18:6:12 or 10:10:10.

About half of the farm is deficient in phosphorus and potassium so this is a target area for Philip. If the weather is wet, he will stay with urea and spread the compounds later.