Spring is here, at last, this week with rising temperatures, some welcome sunshine and a few good drying days to help us to forget the last few weeks of hardship.

The sunshine has coincided nicely with the start of the breeding season here, so it should help the first round of AI to hold fairly well.

We decided not to synchronise the heifers for the moment after all of the rough weather over the last few weeks, so we are breeding them off natural heats, with scratchcards and tail paint helping heat detection. We will do this for around 10 days, and we might inject any not bred with progesterone at that stage to tidy them up.

We are using some sexed semen on the heifers with natural heats, with mostly conventional straws going into the cows. We will get in early again this year with plenty of high DBI beef bulls on any cows that are under the herd average for index and/or production.

We also scanned the herd pre-breeding this year to try to find any issues as early as possible in the season. We have some follow-up work to do after this scan to help to speed things up for a few problem cows. Some are a bit slow to clean up after calving and some are not cycling yet or have other small issues. With the scan information, we should be able to get them all sorted out reasonably quickly.

Most of these girls with problems will get beef straws when we get them cycling to keep costs down for cows that will obviously struggle a bit to hold in-calf early in the season. The scan should be worthwhile even for segregating the cows into groups for different types of straws.

High status group

The high status group that are suitable for more expensive sexed straws were identified, the main body of the herd for conventional dairy and beef straws, and the problem cows that are really only suitable for cheaper beef bulls.

The first three weeks of breeding are always a bit manic with heat detection, drafting and breeding of cows and heifers, but we will try to find a bit of time to get our few acres of re-seeding done. Everything has been put on the long finger by the weather, so jobs are piling up to some extent.

We have a good contracting team in place though, so we should get the grass seed in, the silage fertiliser out and get the grazing ground topped up for the next round. Grass growth has really taken off this week, so we will try to close and fertilise a good portion of the grazing platform for first cut silage.

Drawing breath

We should be able to draw breath then when we have the first three weeks of breeding done and the number of cows in heat starts to fall off every day. The heifers will have their bulls out to tidy the job up and everything should calm down after a very chaotic spring.

The calves are nearly sorted as well, with the majority of the replacement heifers gone out to grass this week. The later ones and a few beef stragglers will be on the automatic feeder for a bit longer but should be easy enough to manage as long as they stay healthy.