Seven inches of rain and 16 round bales of silage. That’s how much rain fell and silage Michael Doran fed in Duncormick, Co Wexford, since the first Grass 10 farm walk on 24 January.

Michael and his wife Ciara are milking 230 cows on their 80ha milking block. While there is 80ha available for grazing, the block is split in two, with 28ha a half mile up a public road, which is only grazed at the shoulders of the year. The farm runs a stocking rate of 2.9 cows/ha at the shoulders and 4.4 cows/ha in between.

Ninety per cent of the herd calved in the first six weeks of the calving season, so with compact calving and a high stocking rate, the demand for grass is high. In January, Michael had a very high average farm cover of 1,119kg/ha. At the time of the first farm walk, he said he would struggle to achieve the grazing targets of 30% by 1 March, 60% by St Patrick’s Day and 100% by 4 April.

At the follow-up farm walk in the lashing rain last Wednesday, Michael had an average farm cover of 720kg/ha. He had 80% of the farm grazed and was on track to finish the first round on 4 April, as planned.

When I talked to Michael this week, he said: “We started the second round on Tuesday (3 April) and we managed to graze off 100% of the farm in the first round. We didn’t push them too hard to graze out silage ground in the last week due to good covers back on the main platform. The average farm cover (AFC) across the whole farm is 743kg DM/ha.

‘‘However, with silage ground out and one paddock sprayed off on the main platform, the AFC is 991kg DM/ha. We had a growth of 70kg per day last week but with silage ground excluded, it was 85kg per day on the home farm excluding purchased land up the road (silage ground), which means we have grown two tonnes of grass in the year to date so far.”

Despite prolonged wet weather which saw over seven inches (175mm) of rain falling in February and March, Michael still got the milking cows out to grass every day this spring. In addition, the 60 maiden heifers were turned out to grass on 20 February to increase the area grazed and to help bring down the average farm cover.

Michael says: “Growth rates were phenomenal this spring. We were getting over 20kg per day in February, which we wouldn’t normally expect but we shouldn’t have been surprised because soil temperatures were way higher than normal.”

The result of the higher-than-normal growth rates was that the farm has grown 1.5t/ha to date. On the practical side, this presented problems because the high covers kept growing. Some paddocks that were at 2,500kg in January ended up being closer to 3,500kg by the time they were grazed. This slowed down the herd and meant that the farm had less grazed than planned by 1 March. In terms of quality, Michael said that the high covers kept their quality pretty good up to about two weeks ago. At that stage, they started to become stemmy and he said that while milk production did not drop during grazing, it did not improve.

On-off grazing was used for prolonged periods this spring to get the grass into the cows. If it was raining after milking, cows were held in the yard for a few hours until it cleared off and then they were turned out. If they had to be brought in at around lunchtime, they were held in the collecting yard until milking.

When cows had to come in at night, they were given a small amount of silage. Michael says that giving this silage was more psychological for him than of any nutritional benefit to the cows. During March, one bale was divided up among all the milkers, which worked out at around 2kg dry matter per cow. We just kept splitting the bale with the shear grab and spreading it out among seven or eight feed bays.’’

The maiden heifers were moved on every 12 to 18 hours depending on the weather. If they had the field half-grazed and it started raining they would be moved on then regardless of whether it was cleaned out or not because Michael says the heifers would keep walking, but when they have fresh grass they stop walking and graze.

One paddock was fairly severely poached by the cows. Other paddocks had small sections poached. The badly poached paddock had a cover back on it of about 300kg last week.

Michael suggested he will stick to crossbreeding for 2017, with Jersey and Holstein Friesian sires using a mix of Jersey, Kiwicross and New Zealand Friesian, but a final sire selection is not complete yet.

Michael vasectomised three bulls this week. Every year, he keeps 10 bulls, of which three are normally vasectomised and the rest are turned out as clean-up bulls on both cows and heifers once AI finishes. This year, cows will be inseminated for seven weeks of AI. Heifers get six days of AI and then any heifers not seen in standing heat get a shot of estrumate and they are then served on heat. Once heifers are served, they move back to the outfarm and run with a couple of bulls.

Michael said: “All bull calves and surplus heifers are sold. We kept 75 heifer calves and while they have access to outdoors they are not gone to grass yet, but if the weather holds dry we might let them out towards the end of this week. The cows are milking well – milk yield is 23.1 litres at 4.68 % fat and 3.59% protein (1.97kg MS/cow/day).’’