We are getting near the end of the season here in Clara. We have dried off another 20 heifers this week that are 10 weeks away from calving and we will be drying off a few more batches over the next month as we get closer to their calving date.

We give the heifers 10 weeks dry and the cows eight weeks. Most of the herd is in great condition after all of the extra concentrate that we fed this year, but there are a few heifers and young cows that are a bit light and these will get a few weeks extra dry and a small amount of feed during the dry period to bring them up to target.

We have 80% of the farm grazed off at this stage but the last 20% has a very high cover of just over 2,000kgsDM/ha. With the numbers being dried off and extra silage going in, we can keep the milking cows out day and night until the end of this month.

Cows are still milking 13.5 litres at 4.82% fat and 3.90% protein or 1.21 kgs milk solids at the moment with 3kgs meal per day going in.

The working hours have changed a bit on the farm over the last two weeks. We still start milking at 7am but we’ve had to cross a road with the cows after evening milking for the last while so we start evening milking at 3pm rather than 4pm. It means that the cows are safer crossing the road in the last of the daylight and everything is finished by 5pm. The obvious bonus is that everyone working is finished and home by 5pm as well, so there’s a bit of extra downtime.

We weighed our heifer calves so that we can have their batches sorted out before they go into the shed for the winter. They averaged 235kgs with a range from 180 to 290kgs. We have some of the smaller ones separated out already on 2kgs of meal per day and unrestricted in a large field of short leafy grass.

These smaller cattle will be batched separately for the winter to prevent competition with the stronger animals and fed an extra 1kg of meal to try to bring them up to target.

I was able to punch in the weights into my Smartphone as I was standing beside the crush and the programme on the phone was able to tell me the average liveweight gain since the last weighing and automatically update the farm programme on my laptop when I went to the office. It was the same for scanning the herd this year and I use it to measure grass in the same way. I won’t go as far as to say that the Smartphone is as important as a tractor on the farm now but it’s definitely up there in terms of useful equipment.

The progress of this sort of technology is astonishing. A few years ago, none of us knew what an ‘app’ was. Now there’s an app for everything that we need to access, including news, banking, shopping, social media, sport and even farming.

The social media apps, if used properly, can be of huge benefit to farmers in terms of gathering technical information and news and for keeping in contact with other farmers in what can be an isolated and stressful occupation at times.