Water: The hot weather over the last week put a spotlight on the subject of water and the importance of having good flow rates. Cows can drink twice their normal water intake on very hot days, which puts pressure on water systems.

Driving around the country, we see many herds queuing up at water troughs, which is a big problem, leading to a drop in production and extra stress, on top of any potential heat stress. While the high temperatures have passed for now, the likelihood is we will have more hot weather before the summer is out. It’s in weeks like this that the return on investment from a good water system is really evident. A lot of farmers focus on water trough size, but really it is pipe size that is most critical.

A high-capacity pump won’t be able to push water through a small pipe fast enough and equally, a small pipe won’t be able to deliver enough water to a large trough fast enough to keep it filled. Anyone with 60 or 70 cows or more and still using half- or three-quarter inch pipes will be at the upper end of system capacity. A good water system doesn’t have to be a Rolls-Royce job. I know some farmers have installed larger diameter pipes and left them above ground to save on cost, only burying at gaps and across roadways.

Feed: With grass growth rates finally up to and over 100kg DM/ha/day on many farms, the long-awaited burst in growth has finally come. With abundant high-quality grass available, the thinking behind feeding high levels of meal needs to be seriously challenged, given where milk prices are at.

Leaving aside minerals, there is no nutritional benefit to feeding meal when grass is abundant. Meal won’t improve fertility and while it might give a boost to milk yield, that is usually a short-term gain because every time supplement is fed, less grass is grazed and this has the effect of reducing quality. Over the space of a few rotations, grass quality declines and with it so does milk yield. I know some farmers want to feed meal for cow flow or to feed minerals, such as magnesium. On the cow flow side, this could be the year to start feeding straights such as rolled oats or barley. Cost wise, I would expect both to be available for around €200/t mark, which is 30% cheaper than compound rations. These straights can be fed through conventional, in-parlour feeders.

Beef bulls: As most farmers have more than three weeks of breeding now complete, many will be finishing up with dairy artificial insemination (AI) and moving to beef AI. The big change during this spring was the increase in attention paid by calf buyers to commercial beef value (CBV). Based on present beef prices, I would expect a cooling off in the calf trade for next season. This indicates that quality will be even more important and the best predictor of quality is CBV. For dairy farmers picking beef bulls, the criteria to use is the dairy beef index as this incorporates both the beef traits and the calving traits. Ultimately, some sacrifice has to be made on calving ease in order to get higher carcase weight traits, but there is plenty of good bulls less than 4% calving difficulty.