Grass growth and quality have come back really strong over the last two weeks. Weather conditions have been perfect on this dry farm with plenty of rain fall and high temperatures.

We have been doing a mixture of topping and pre-mowing to ensure grass quality in the next round. Growth rate recorded on Thursday was 83kg for the previous five days and demand of 51kg/day so I have decided to skip over more paddocks and leave the average farm cover at 200kg/cow.

The value of measuring the farm twice a week in periods of high growth rates cannot be stressed enough. On Monday we had decided to take out 10 acres for surplus bales and as the mower only arrived on Thursday I decided to measure again. With grass jumping out of the ground we decided to take out another 10 acres which will be baled on Saturday.

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Pre-grazing yields are holding well at between 1,400DM/ha and 1,600DM/ha and quality is excellent with a very good clean out being achieved. Cows are being followed with 1,600 gallons of watery slurry per acre and the farm has been blanket spread with fertiliser all year and is due its next application next week. It will be spread with 27 units of N. The 10 acres we reseeded earlier this year was post sprayed with a product called alistell at a rate of 1.45l/acre and grazed seven days later with the cows.

A good clean out was achieved so quality should be good next round. We will graze these two paddocks aggressively over the course of the year at a cover of no more than 1,200DM/ha to ensure adequate tillering takes place. These paddocks were disced and levelled at a cost of €45/acre.

Cow performance

Cows are doing 16.5kg of milk at 3.65% protein, 4.41% fat (1.4kgMS/cow) and a SCC of 166. The bulls are still with the cows and 11 weeks breeding will be completed tomorrow. The bulls that were with the heifers were taken away today.

With Tuesday being national farm safety day, Patrick (Stafford, the host farm) and I completed an inspection of all machinery and ensured that every PTO shaft had the correct guards and were in working order, anything that was not was replaced.

*Barry Reilly is a second year professional diploma in Dairy Farm Management student. He is working on the farm of Patrick Stratford, Virginia, Co. Cavan.