Over the next week we will begin to see farmers house their cows fully for the winter. Despite a lot of rain seven to 10 days ago, it has been a very good back end to the grazing season and most farmers will be satisfied.

The issue at this stage is that grass is running low and farmers are running out of land to graze. Now, in most situations there is lots of grass on farms but this grass is, correctly being left for the spring.

If you don’t keep grass for the spring it won’t be present in spring and as we know, spring grazing is much more valuable than autumn grazing.

Reserving this grass for the spring takes discipline and where it hasn’t been done before it also takes a leap of faith in that it won’t disappear or degrade over the winter.

Cut off point

The general cut off point is to house when average farm cover reaches between 400kg/ha and 600kg/ha this week, meaning the closing cover by 1 December will be 700kg to 900kg/ha.

Where cows are being housed full-time, feed the best quality silage that is available, but again, make sure and keep enough silage for emergency use next spring.

Meal feeding rates should be based on silage quality and milk yield. Cows in late lactation don’t require much meal, somewhere in the region of 2kg to 4kg is sufficient, but this presumes silage quality is decent.

Don’t forget to dry off low yielding and first lactation cows. These cows won’t be milking well so it doesn’t make sense to be giving them a lot of feed.

Keep cubicle beds clean through regular scraping of passageways and cleaning and disinfecting of cubicle beds. Beds should be cleaned and scraped at least twice a day.