Weather

It’s safe to say the weather over the past few months has been dire, but I suppose this is the season to be getting it. However, it is causing lots of problems for farmers with full slurry tanks and those on drier land trying to get stock out. The good news is that the weather is set to get much drier from today (Thursday) onwards, with little or no rain forecast for most of the country for next week. This will present a dilemma for some farmers; should you spread slurry on the dry fields, or save them for grazing? Unless you use a trailing shoe or dribble bar device for spreading slurry, you can’t really do both. In practice, the slurry has to be spread, but be conscious not to spread over all the dry land and scupper any chances of getting cows out in the next few weeks. Land will dry up fast at this time of year, especially after a dry and windy week. Daylight hours are longer and there’s plenty of sunshine on clear days.

Milk fever

Some farmers are having problems with milk fever. The issues usually start around now when more mature cows start calving. Older cows, fat cows and high yielders are more at risk. They say that for every clinical case there could be up to four subclinical cases, which means they have an underlying calcium deficiency. This could cause retained cleanings, mastitis and displaced abomasums. In a clinical case, a bottle of calcium into the bloodstream and a bottle of magnesium under the skin usually works. Some farmers will give at-risk cows a calcium bolus after calving. Potassium and magnesium are often complicating factors. Dry cows should be on a low-potash and high-magnesium diet before calving. Some silages are high in potash and this will prevent the cow from mobilising magnesium after calving. Magnesium is used to speed up the absorption of calcium from the bone. So feeding cows extra magnesium pre-calving will help to prevent milk fever. Others will feed magnesium flakes or sprinkle cal-mag on silage pre-calving to help prevent milk fever. Some farmers feed up to 40g of magnesium per day in the run-up to calvings and find that it reduces milk fever and retained cleanings. Most dry cow minerals, fed at 100g/day, will only provide 18 to 26g per day.

High covers

There are lots of high grass covers on dairy farms carried over from last autumn. Some of this carry-over was involuntary, due to it being too wet to graze. Many of these paddocks have excessively high covers and have leaves turning yellow. Previous research has shown that the quality of these swards are good enough up to about mid-March, but will deteriorate fast after this point. So try and get them grazed before then, if land is dry enough. Because these are high covers, you will need stock to have built up a good intake before attempting to graze them. In my view, most herds are a week or two away from going into high covers. I would still spread fertiliser on the high covers. Nitrogen will act like anti-freeze on these covers and stop them from deteriorating further. Spreading nitrogen now will also lead to quicker recovery after grazing.