Poor weather conditions last week led to poor graze-outs on many farms.

It may be time to get the roll of wire and pigtail stakes back out.

The summer grazing of 36-hour or 24-hour grazing blocks is an ideal system that works very well when grass is managed correctly and great from a labour point of view.

Rainfall

But last week saw a lot of rainfall and cows are now grazing stronger covers as we try to build grass on farms.

As a result, achieving the desired residual of 4cm is becoming more challenging.

The first problem with grazing stronger grass covers is that cows will start to walk down grass.

Allocating grass to the cows after each milking will help reduce this.

However, this leads to its own problems, as you end up restricting the cow and force them to clean out paddocks every grazing.

So what can we do, taking a paddock with three grazings in it.

Options

Set up two breaks in the field, the first around half way and the second leaving about 10% to 20% at the back of the field.

In the first grazing, the cows will have 50% of the field, meaning they have more than enough grass.

After the grazing, roll up the wire and give the cows the next 30% of the field.

The third grazing is where the cow does the work. Roll up the last wire, giving the cows the final 20% of fresh grass, which they will graze first, and then they will have to work hard to graze over the previous two sections.

This method adds a bit of labour to your grass management, but is very effective and will help achieve the desired graze-out and increase grass utilisation.