Meal

As the longest day of the year approaches, spring-calving farms are firmly in mid-season management mode.

Too many farmers are feeding too much meal for little or no return and risk squandering the rewards of the higher milk price. In mid-lactation, the typical response to concentrate is 0.7kg milk for every 1kgDM of meal fed. It’s important to remember that every tonne of meal purchased is around 15% water, so farmers need to feed 1.17kg of meal in order to feed 1kg DM of meal.

If meal costs €290/t fresh, that’s €340/t dry matter or 34c/kg dry matter. From this, the return in milk is likely to be 0.7kg which at 36c/kg milk price is worth 25c/day in extra milk sales for every 1kg DM of meal fed. So the farmer is spending 34c/day to get 25c/day. If the response is greater, at say 1kg of milk for every 1kg DM of meal, the farmer will be making 36c after spending 34c – a slight margin. However, for the vast majority of Irish herds the response is likely to be much less than 1:1, so feeding the meal will be a net cost.

Now there are other benefits to feeding some level of meal. For instance, it being a carrier for essential minerals and it also improves cow flow at milking. However, feeding meal during the summer months is unlikely to deliver an economic return for the vast majority of farmers.

Farmers who get a high response to meal need to look at their grassland management. If grass quality is bad, the response to meal will be higher but if grass quality is good the response will be less, as the cow is already expressing her genetic potential on good-quality grass. Many farmers with batch meal feeders cannot feed less than 0.8kg of meal. Some will only feed meal at one milking, or switch to a bulky feed such as rolled barley or other lower-cost and bulky straights/blends for the mid-season.

Fertiliser

After three weeks of very high growth rates, some farmers are asking if they can cut back on nitrogen. The general answer is yes, but it depends on what level they are cutting back from.

Those who continue to spread one bag/acre of CAN or equivalent after grazing can afford to cut back by around 10 units/acre. But those who are already at lower, more sustainable N rates should probably continue at 15 to 20 units/acre after grazing. About 2t/ha of grass has been grown in the last three weeks and this will have used up significant quantities of nitrogen. We could start to see grass getting stressed in the next few weeks, so keeping some level of nitrogen spread will be prudent. However, on fields that have a high level of clover, a round or two of chemical nitrogen can be skipped.

A lot of grazing ground has been cut for silage in the last few weeks to manage surplus grass. There’s a big difference between grazing and cutting for silage in terms of off-takes as the cow puts a lot of nutrients back on in the form of dung and urine. A typical bale of silage contains 1.6 units of phosphorus and 10 units of potash. A four- to five-bale/acre crop will remove around six to eight units of P/ac and 40-50 units of K/ac.