We are still wading through grass here in Abbeyleix. Thankfully, we escaped a lot of the heavy rain over the weekend compared with some other parts of the country.

We have received 40mm over the past fortnight, but ground conditions have held up reasonably well and, more importantly, graze-outs have continued to be excellent.

Tuesday was the trickiest day of the week, but the forecast is looking much more favourable for the next seven to 10 days. Hopefully, this will give us a decent window to get the zero grazing finished without too much difficulty. At this stage of the year, every dry day is valuable, particularly when trying to get jobs completed before ground conditions deteriorate any further.

Average farm cover is sitting at 950kg DM/ha, with pre-grazing covers still around 2,000kg DM/ha. Growth over the past fortnight was 35kg DM/ha per day, which is reasonably close to our demand of 40kg DM/ha. We are behind where we should be on the autumn rotation planner, with just 41% of the farm grazed to date, compared with a target closer to 60%. However, we had to make a start on zero grazing when we did, as leaving it any later would have made it very difficult to get through the remaining area in time. With covers of 2,000-2,500kg DM/ha across parts of the farm, it was always going to take time to get through the ground.

Despite being behind the planner, I am happy enough with how things are working out. The cows are getting plenty of grass, clean-outs are excellent and we have the meal feeding reduced to just 2kg per cow in the parlour. Milk yield might be a little lower than it would be if we were feeding more meal, but after the amount of concentrate we had to feed during the drought, it is satisfying to be back relying so heavily on grass.

There is also a good return in terms of milk solids. The last collection showed butterfat of 5.90% and protein of 4.58%. Bulk milk SCC is also holding at around 150,000, so that is another positive as we move towards the winter.

The plan now is to get the zero grazing finished while the weather allows and continue making the most of the grass that is available. After the difficult summer, it is good to see the cows still getting a strong grass diet this late in the year.

We will be drying off the first batch of cows tomorrow. This group will consist mainly of early-calving first lactation cows, which will get a 12-week dry period. There will also be a few empty cows with high SCC, along with cows that are practically drying themselves off and producing less than five litres a day.

I will be following selective dry cow therapy again this year. Any cow that recorded an SCC above 100,000 at any stage during the year will receive an antibiotic tube at drying off. I will complete one more milk recording and may also carry out a couple of Genocells tests to help keep track of SCC in the run-up to drying off. Drying off is always an important stage of the year, and getting it right now should help set the cows up for the next lactation.

Fertility has been on my mind again over the past week. I scanned a number of cows that were being rechecked for twins, along with cows that the collars had flagged as doubtful for being in calf. A few had also shown heats on the system around 150 days after service, which had me fairly worried.

Thankfully, when we scanned them, all of these cows were in-calf. It was a great relief, particularly as we had five sets of twins identified at scanning and all five cows are still in-calf. I suspect the change in routine, with cows coming in for zero grazing and being kept closer together than usual, may have contributed to some unusual collar readings. It is difficult to know for certain, but the scan results were certainly reassuring.

However, we still have 15% of the herd empty, which is disappointing. That figure is higher than I would like, and it explains why I was becoming concerned when the collars started flagging additional cows as possibly not in-calf.