While the sun was shining bright on Sunday, three weeks ago the weather was very wet and as a result grazing conditions were poor at the time.

Cows are now back grazing these paddocks and one thing that is obvious is that there is a lot of stem around and plenty of poorly grazed dungpads.

Keeping quality grass in front of cows into June will ensure high yields of high solids milk. Get grass wrong and milk yield will drop as will protein percentage.

Good news

The good news is that it is relatively straight forward to maintain grass quality, but it’s not easy to achieve it.

The first piece of information required is to know whether the farm is in a state of surplus, deficit or on target.

Most farms are now either on target or in a surplus. This will be determined by doing a grass walk. Average farm cover should be between 160 and 180kg/cow.

If it is substantially above this, then the farm is in surplus and action should be taken. This action includes skipping over paddocks for silage.

Fields with poor quality grass should be targeted for silage, thereby leaving higher quality grass for grazing.

In some cases it won’t always be possible to skip over all the stemmy grass that’s on the farm. Topping could be an option to control post grazing residuals.

Pre-mowing is another option. A lot depends on the quality of the grass. Topping or pre-mowing won’t improve the quality of the grass offered to the cows in the current rotation, but it should improve quality at the next rotation.

Pre-mowing removes the cows’ ability to select grass, so if quality is poor you are essentially asking the cows to eat the poor quality grass which won’t be good for production.

The advantage of pre-mowing is that less grass is wasted compared to topping but the best of all is probably to take the paddock out for silage.

If pre-mowing, cutting the grass shortly before the cows go in seems to work best and not to cut too far ahead of the cows or cut more than will be eaten in 24 hours.

If topping, it’s important to do it as soon as the cows leave the paddock after a 24-hour period to avoid topping too much re-growth.

It’s important to remember that carrying out a lot of mechanical cutting will reduce subsequent grass growth rates.