Last week, I attended the Irish Grassland Sheep Conference in Kells. It was an interesting event. It focused primarily on the different ways to organise farm labour. Mairead McGuinness highlighted the ever-increasing pressures on farmers to increase their speed on the treadmill just to maintain their incomes from agriculture.

There was also a panel discussion in which the various forms of farm labour were discussed.

It is something that I have to contend with annually for the lambing period, but the seasonality of it means that it is often hard to get the same staff back the following year, especially now that other sectors of the economy are providing full-time employment.

Having facilities set up properly is an area that was highlighted as important for reducing the amount of labour required and making life easier on both man and beast. It is also easier to get help from people, whether family or employed, if they know that operations will run smoothly.

The few rain showers last weekend were very welcome after the fine spell, and it is surprising how everything around the farm is starting to take on a healthier glow. It is a wonderful sight to watch the fields and trees almost greening up before my eyes, they had been looking off lately, due mainly to the east wind that had been hitting us.

Grass is growing at a great pace now on the farm and lambs seem to be thriving well due to this abundance of fresh grass and the sun on their backs.

Grass is growing at 70kg DM/ha and our demand is 63kg DM/ha. There are 14 days of grazing ahead at the moment.

Heifers

The heifers are due to arrive on the farm this week and it is important that I have enough grass to feed all the stock once they arrive.

They will act as a flying mob, moving around the farm along with the dry hoggets to clean up paddocks after the ewes and lambs have moved on.

I have applied a bag of Sulpha- CAN per acre across the farm to maintain grass growth. I have a few paddocks that are borderline with regard to dropping out for silage, and will wait until I have the heifers in to decide their fate. The winter silage stocks are recovering quickly, with about 150 bales left to be made. I should have these done in the next 10 days, weather permitting.

There were no big yields from the fields cut for silage so far, but we’re coming up to the end of May and a lot of the grass varieties will be beginning to go to seed – as this happens the feed value of the silage reduces.

The benefit of these lower yields (five to six bales per acre, or less in some) is that the fields go back into the grazing rotation quickly and replace the few paddocks that have to be dropped for silage in the meantime.

Maggots

I have just had my first lamb with maggots this year, brought on by the mild, damp weather over the weekend. I plan to apply fly preventative to lambs this week to prevent any more cases of blowfly strike.

I have used this product for the last few years and was delighted with how it worked. It gives 19 weeks’ cover against blowflies, so with any luck I won’t have to treat lambs again during the summer this year.

All lambs will also received cobalt when they are in the yard and possibly a worm drench, depending on how the different FEC results come back for each mob.

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Farmer Writes: closing fields for silage and spreading fertiliser

Farmer Writes: fatigue sets in as lambing comes to an end