Reasonably good weather throughout most of October has left many farmers with the feeling that winter has crept up on them.

Torrential rain last week very much announced the fact that winter was in and with it, farmers have begun housing stock and drying off cows.

The priority cows for drying off are first calvers and thin cows. While many farmers are comfortable giving mature cows eight weeks of a dry period, first-calving cows need longer.

These animals are still growing and need longer to recover from their first lactation. There can often be a high incidence of poor fertility in second calvers and this could be down to the fact that they haven’t had a long enough break between first and second lactation.

Given that many of these cows will be calving in early February, which is 12 weeks away, they will need to be dried off in the coming weeks if they are to get a long dry period.

The other category of cow requiring a long dry period is thin cows. These are cows at a condition score of less than 2.75 today and who are calving in February and March.

Presuming silage quality is moderate, these cows will require a longer dry period in order to build up body condition score in advance of calving.

Challenge

Now, with all the meal being fed on farms cow body condition score is not the widespread challenge that it used to be.

While this proves the inefficiency with feeding a lot of meal (cows putting the extra calories on their back rather in the tank), there are still plenty of thin cows in many herds that need minding.

Drying off needs planning in terms of ordering tubes and setting aside the time to dry off and then deciding on where to put the dry cows.

With grass now getting scarce, many farmers are deciding to house cows at night in order to reduce grass demand.

This may also help with reducing damage to ground from grazing.