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Grass: Despite heavy frosts over last weekend, soil temperatures and grass growth rates for January are quite good.
All farmers should complete a grass walk now to know how much feed they have on the farm. This is as important as measuring how much silage you have or how much meal is in the bin. Generally, there is more grass on farms than people think. You really need to cut and weigh a good few of the higher covers to train your eye.
Dry matters are always higher in spring, usually ranging from 15% to 18%. This means there is more feeding value per mouthful of grass. After doing the grass cover, put the figures into PastureBase to get average farm cover and to help identify the paddocks with most grass (target grazing in late February/early March) and those with lighter covers that could be grazed early, or spread with slurry and grazed later.
Don’t spread all the low covers with slurry – otherwise you won’t have suitable covers to start grazing in. Low-emission slurry spreading helps as it reduces taint on grass. Where slurry is spread, the first round of nitrogen should be skipped. Ideally, no more than 2,500gal/acre of slurry should be spread at any one time.
After doing the grass walk, use the opening grass cover and the expected number of calvings week (provided by ICBF) to formulate a spring grass budget. Target an average farm cover of around 500kg/ha in early April. Tinker with the budget to achieve this while feeding as much grass as possible. Alternatively, do up a spring rotation planner based on a set area per day. Target to have 30% of the farm grazed in the first three to four weeks of grazing. The Irish Farmers Journal grass courses begin shortly.
Once a day: The once a day (OAD) milking conference was on in Tipperary last week. The farmer speakers had successfully adapted to full-time once-a-day milking.
The things that stood out were that you need to be good at grass, you need to have good cows and you need to be milk recording and able to make decisions based on data, ie you need to be a good all round farmer.
When successfully implemented, the profitability on OAD farms is comparable to twice-a-day farms. Moorepark researchers outlined the latest research results from the OAD trial. This looked at short-term as well as long-term OAD milking on milk yield.
The results from short-term OAD are really impressive and all farmers should take note. It shows milking OAD for a few weeks in spring will have no effect on overall lactation yield.
Calving: Make sure to stock up on essential supplies for calving. Bottles of calcium and magnesium for downer cows, arm-length gloves, naval disinfectant, milk replacer and general disinfectant will all be needed over the coming months. Put essential items in the one place which is easily accessed and make sure items are put back in their place when you are finished.
SHARING OPTIONS: