The burning issue for farmers in Donegal, like elsewhere, is the weather. For many farmers, turning cows out to grass is a secondary objective - a bigger issue at the moment concerns slurry tanks filling up and limited places for it to go.

Dan Callaghan made a decision to spread slurry last week as his tanks were filling up. With an average farm cover of 1,070kg/ha, he had no choice but to spread it on a field with a higher cover than he would like at about 1,000kg.

“I went out with the intention of spreading one load but by the time I was finished I had 11 loads spread. I kept looking behind me for wheel marks but it seemed fine so I kept going.”

He ended up getting slurry out on 7% of the grazing area. Damage was limited by dropping the wire between the field and the farm roadway so the tractor and slurry tanker could drive straight in to the field and use a different entry and exit point each time.

Dan has a dry farm with 18 ha available to the milking cows, and is surrounded by houses and the main road through the village of Killygordon. He milks 55 cows and has four cows calved so far.

Over 74% of the herd calves in six weeks and he intends to be finished the first grazing rotation by 10 April, but he hasn’t started grazing yet as calving has only just begun.

At the farm walk, Donal Patton, the farm manager from Ballyhaise said that while grazing is extremely difficult this year, decisions about whether to graze or not cannot be made from within the farmyard so he encouraged farmers to go out and walk your paddocks daily and make a decision then.

Donal also said that the first step in spreading fertiliser is to have it in the yard ready to be spread. Less than a quarter of the farmers present said that they had the fertiliser in the yard ready to go out.