Spring calving has started on largest farm in the BETTER farm programme. Laid out in one block, the 123 hectare farm will run 120 suckler cows in 2018 and rear in excess of 110 dairy-cross beef calves. Dwayne Stanley works full-time on the farm with his father Raymond and Uncle Gilbert.

The calving pattern is split, with 70 due to calve this spring.

Spring calving

“We have four calves on the ground at present and all have come okay so far. One issue is that our calved suckler heifers are still penned with a dry cow group – shed space is quite tight. There is an excellent creep area off the slatted pen and the calves are doing well, but it means I can’t segregate the calved females for supplementary feeding just yet. Normally I would turn them out but the land is just too wet at the moment. A few dry days will change things quite quickly here though,” Dwayne said.

"We are tight for shed space here. There is a potential draft of 2016-born bullocks that can go to the factory soon in a separate shed and if push comes to shove I can do some swapping when they go and pen the fresh calvers on their own with a creep area for calves."

Heifers

Heifers are calving ahead of the main cow herd, having run for a season with the Stanley’s Hereford bull. He ran with 20 heifers and six cows and all were in-calf after a nine-week season.

The Stanleys' 2017 autumn-born calves have grown at a rate of 1.02kg/day from birth. Cows were supplemented with 1-2kg of a simple ration until the end of the breeding season. Dwayne will scan the herd in the coming weeks.

Next up for the Stanleys is to complete a paddocking job on the block of land covered in the Irish Farmers Journal last year. Approximately one third of the land was reseeded in September, while the rest was done in May and carried significantly more stock than previous years. Unfortunately, heavy rain made it impossible to graze off the reseed prior to housing. Now there is a cover of around 1400kg DM/ha (9.5cm) on the field.

The initial plan was to get dairy beef calves to this in the coming weeks (250-300kg). Given their low live weights, minimal ground damage would be done during wet weather. However, these covers are slightly on the strong side for this type of animal and the Stanleys will now rethink their strategy.

Read about how the Stanley's soil fertility has changed after one year in the BETTER farm programme in tomorrow's paper.

Read more

Suckler herd health calendar plan

The Stanley's Grass10 walk last autumn

The Stabley's reseeding protocol

All BETTER farm material