Chris McCarthy

Co Westmeath

The cows started calving on my farm on 1 February. To date, I have 43 cows calved out of 50. I intend to have all cows calved by 1 April.

This year has seen a great tightening of my calving pattern compared to before I joined the BETTER Farm programme. I am well on target to achieve a compact 10-week calving season as outlined in my three-year farm plan.

Tighter calving is a huge benefit to me from both a management point of view and the fact that I work off-farm. I find it is much easier to pay attention to detail when all my cows are calving over two months.

It has led to a very busy six weeks on the farm with five cows calving inside 10 hours on one day. Last spring, the cows were fed 5kg of concentrates and straw during the fodder crisis.

Although it was a huge financial cost, I am reaping the rewards now with 96% of the cows scanned in-calf and maintaining a tight calving spread.

This year sees the first calves born from the two Charolais bulls I purchased last year. The bulls are sired by Balthazar and CF52. So far, I have found no great difference between the sires regarding quality or calving difficulty. It will be interesting to see if there are differences as the year progresses regarding growth rates and overall performance.

I housed my cows on 1 November even though I could have left them out with weather and ground conditions being so good. However, I thought it was better to have grass reserves ready when the nutritional demand is greater in the spring.

This has proven to be a good decision. I now have excellent grass covers for spring calving cows. I started letting out cows from the beginning of March onto fields that were closed since early October. Once these covers are grazed I plan to go out with slurry.