Widespread rain is forecast across Ireland for the start of the week and then it’s to get colder later in the week.

This is probably the first real sign that winter is coming in. The last two months, with an odd exception has been terrific weather for farming and this is no clearer seen than in the fact most tillage farmers have all their winter crops sown by now.

The change in weather means two things: Firstly grazing conditions are likely to deteriorate and grass utilisation will fall.

Improve utilisation

Moving to allocating grass in 12-hour breaks will help to improve utilisation as there will be less grass walked in. Use multiple access points into and out of fields.

Try and reduce the amount of heavy supplement such as silage being fed. I know some farmers are considering housing cows by night in order to stretch the grazing out to mid-November.

However, this drastically reduces the cows’ appetite for grass and so utilisation drops and you see cows gathering by the gap more often.

In terms of temperatures, the forecast is saying there could be frost in places later in the week. At the moment, soil temperatures are running at about 3°C higher than normal for the time of year.

The only advice is to monitor average farm cover weekly to make sure that you don’t dip below your target.

This is reflected in grass growth, with average growth rates running at around 40kg/day which is higher than normal.

However, if the weather gets cold and wet we can expect to see this fall back quickly. There’s not a lot that can be done to prevent this.

The only advice is to monitor average farm cover weekly to make sure that you don’t dip below your target. Most farmers will need to have a closing farm cover of between 600kg and 900kg/ha on 1 December.

They can let average farm cover drop lower than this in November, but be careful not to let it go too low and be short of grass next spring.

With the increased costs of fertiliser, the importance of having enough grass in spring has never been greater.