Adapting quickly to autumn: With heavy rain in many parts of the country this week, conditions change quickly. On heavier farms, it’s likely that more rainfall over the next few days may make grazing conditions more difficult.

There’s no substitute for using strip wires and 12-hour allocations to protect available grass supplies and achieve good utilisation of the available feed. These farms should aim to extend round length to 40 days and build farm cover to 1,100kg DM/ha over the next three weeks.

In contrast, drier farms are yet to see any significant recovery.

The objective on drier farms now has to be to slow down rotation length after the rain to 50 days for the next two weeks and allow as much grass as possible to build up. This is short-term pain for long-term gain and the target should be to increase average farm cover by 150-200kg each week and get as close as possible to 1,200kg DM/ha by the end of September.

Lameness: With the sudden change in weather, its inevitable that cases of lameness will emerge over the next few weeks. To prevent it, the first step is to treat affected cows early. If you are not good at hoof-pairing yourself, get a good professional in instead. If a cow has had persistent incurable lameness during the year, now is the time to cull her before it deteriorates further.

If farms are continuing to feed cows because of grass shortages, make sure cows are standing on dry clean surfaces at all times. After the summer, cows are used to the auto-gate (e-gate or batch latch) coming in for feeding during the day or early in the morning.

Continue to use the auto-gates to allow cows to come in themselves for morning and afternoon milking. Cows get a bit slower at walking in during autumn and the temptation is to drive them, which increases lameness. It amazes me how cows walking at their own pace can navigate even rough roadways without problems.

Footbathing the herd will also help to clean and disinfect the hooves and harden the soles to reduce the likelihood of new damage. This should be done at least once a week but more frequently in wet weather. The next step is to attend to roadways, especially those close to the parlour. By getting a digger in to clean off the sides of roadways, rainfall can get away preventing erosion. Animal Health Ireland has announced details of “Healthy Hooves to Healthy Herds” lameness events taking place on 22 and 24 September. More details can be found on its website.

Liners: Milking machine liners need to be changed every 2,000 milkings or every six months. This means that if a new set were installed at the start of calving, they will need to be replaced around now.

New liners reduce the risk of liner slip, mastitis and teat end damage and also speed up the milking process. Get two or three buckets of hot water. Place the new liners in one bucket and dip the clusters with old liners in the other buckets. The hot water will soften the rubber and make it much easier to take off old liners and put on the new ones.