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After nearly two months of higher than normal grass growth rates, most farmers are well behind on their target area to be grazed and closed for the winter.
Most farmers would target to have 60% or more of the farm grazed and closed by the end of October, but, as things stand, a lot of farmers have only 30 or 40% of their farm closed.
Setting targets
Is this a problem? It’s not particularly a problem because of the fact that growth has been good, with strong regrowths.
In my view, setting targets based on area per day is only really useful in the absence of better information, such as average farm cover and growth rates.
Many farms are still growing very well because of later than normal fertiliser spreading and dry and warm weather.
As a result, average farm cover has not dropped as fast as normal and there is still a good bit of grass still on farms.
I don’t think the value of getting cows out of sheds ... is valued high enough in the Teagasc models
But farmers shouldn’t become complacent and graze more grass than they should.
Every day at grass is worth about €1.70 in the autumn, but it’s worth €2.70 in the spring.
Getting cows out to grass in spring is probably worth even more than that, as I don’t think the value of getting cows out of sheds in terms of time, labour and silage savings is valued high enough in the Teagasc models.
Highly stocked farms with a high proportion of cows calving in the first six weeks need to have a closing cover of at least 750kg/ha on 1 December.
This can be increased or decreased based on over-winter growth rates.
This means that some covers of close to 1,500kg/ha will be carried over into the winter.
While carrying over these covers isn’t ideal, it is necessary in order to have grass next spring.
Doing a few grass walks over the next three weeks is absolutely critical in order to know the grass story on your farm.
Working off area grazed is not good enough because this has been an abnormal grass growing year.
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