Weather

Many parts have got more than 50mm of rain over the past week and as a result land is wet and damage is being done in many cases. This has forced many farmers to house stock fully, particularly those on heavy land. Youngstock are usually harder to manage than cows, as they tend to bunch up more in wet weather and walk around more. Bringing them in is the best option. The forecast for the week ahead is mixed, and there’ll be little or no drying from now on as daylight hours are too short. Weanling performance on slats is poor enough. You’ll be doing well if they do 0.4kg/day on average-quality silage and 2kg of meal. But it’s still better than wrecking fields outside. For cows, how long more to graze obviously depends on weather, but also grass covers. Skinning the farm now is a terrible policy. You need to leave a bank of grass for next spring, whether that’s turnout in February or March. It won’t grow much over the winter or even in February or March, so to have grass in spring it must be carried over from November.

Dosing

With stock coming in from fields, attention will be turning to dosing. The main parasites to be treated are lice, worms and fluke. You should leave a few weeks between housing and dosing. Dosing adult cows for worms depends on whether they have had exposure. Whatever about the summer dose, the winter dose is probably essential as most cows would have had exposure at some stage. To check, you can get bulk milk tested or else get dung samples tested. The dung sample test is more accurate as this counts eggs. Again, whether to dose for fluke depends on exposure. After a dry summer and autumn, there will be less exposure to fluke than normal, but farms with a history of fluke should still dose for it. Because you need to use a drench, it’s a difficult dose to administer. Make sure to buy the right fluke drench – not all products are licenced for use in dairy cows. As we flagged before, there is a current shortage of teat sealer in the market. If availability is scarce, target the product you have to the animals that need it most. These would be late-calving and older cows with big teats and weak sphincter muscles in their teats.

Dairy Day

There are just 80 days to go before the first of the spring-calving cows will start calving. More to the point, there are just 10 days to go before Dairy Day on 20 November. This year’s event is bigger than last year, with more exhibitors and more stages. To prepare for calving, we have a special stage with Journal vet Tommy Heffernan going through the entire calving and calf-rearing process, including looking at different options for calf housing. On the Skills Hub stage, one of the six slots (repeated morning and afternoon) features Lloyd Holterman. Lloyd is milking 1,000 cows in Wisconsin, does not use antibiotics in milking cows, does not touch a cow while calving, does not use straw in the calving shed and does not have a family successor. Find out how he does all this and incentivised young farm managers to buy into the business.