Milk price has taken another serious tumble this week, with the base price moving to 30.5c/litre. This is a reduction of 6.5c since June. Grass is still plentiful on the cow ground, so hopefully we can produce high solids milk at a reasonably low cost for the rest of the autumn to offset some of this price drop.

The outlook for next year doesn’t seem great either, with most forecasters predicting a full year of low prices. We’ve learned from 2009, so we will batten down the hatches. Even though we will expand the herd next year, we will have to be careful with every expense.

We have a good percentage of milk locked in at a decent price for next year, so this will help to offset some of the price drop. However, the extra milk we produce next year will not be covered by this scheme. The fixed milk price schemes to date have been based on existing supply or quota. If they are offered again, they will have to be based on planned or predicted supply.

Although we have plenty of grass for the cows, our in-calf heifers are running short of grass early this autumn. We were able to bring them back on to the grazing platform to graze off some of the cow paddocks to help to bring grass under control and to get enough of the grazing area cleared by the end of October. It’s also helping to increase the amount of ground available for slurry spreading.

The heifers will come into the shed before the end of October and this will allow us to keep the cows and the calves out for most of November. The rain came just a fortnight late for the heifers – the grass on their ground is growing well enough now but grew very little through September. The calves will run over this ground now before housing.

The heifers are in great condition and the silage is good so they shouldn’t suffer too much by coming in early. We’ll get a chance to cubicle train them and plenty of opportunity to dose and vaccinate them and get dry-cow minerals into them pre-calving. Another couple of weeks at grass would have been nice but on the upside, they haven’t done any damage to ground and we have a nice area of ground already growing for the spring.

The last of the slurry went out on Monday and Tuesday. We try to put it out behind the cows on the last rotation but with the slurry deadline so early, the acres available are tight. It makes no sense to me that on good dry ground, with conditions perfect for spreading and grass still growing well, we have the slurry tank parked and we’re starting to store slurry for spreading in the second half of January.

This is ridiculous – there should be some application procedure to extend the deadline on suitable ground in suitable conditions. There’s equipment out there to monitor soil conditions from moisture levels to soil temperatures to the previous week’s rainfall. Let science make the decisions if the farmers who work the ground every day of the year aren’t to be trusted.

We don’t want to go back to the situation in the 1980s and 1990s, with slurry tankers dumping slurry in December and January, but closing down on 15 October on dry ground with grass growing at 40-50kg/day and soil temperatures over 10°C is very frustrating.