Last year when we started in the Farm Profit Programme it was the first time we had tried paddock grazing. It is a learning curve to` get used to when to move cattle and when to make them work a little harder, but we couldn’t have had two more different years to try it. Last year we had a flush of grass in late April and into May allowing us to take out nearly 40 surplus bales of silage from the grazing ground. Then the second half of the grazing season was so wet and grass growth really struggled.

This year, while we have managed to keep the cows and calves on the rotational grazing up until lately, the grass never really got ahead of them at any stage. While this meant that they were always grazing high quality swards and getting a fresh move every three to four days, there was little room for error if grass growth had slowed down earlier than it has done here.

We’re confident that when we can make the paddocks work in the two extreme years that we have had, they will be even more successful in a ‘normal’ year.

After-grass

Much of the silage ground here is in an environmental scheme that doesn’t allow cutting until the 1st July. Therefore grazing can be tight right up until mid-July when after-grass starts to come available once again. If we weren’t in the scheme we could cut nearly a full month earlier allowing the grazing to come back into the mix much earlier in the season.

It would also mean that the overall silage quality would be much higher due to the earlier cutting date. This is something we will have to look at in the future but for now we have to work with what we have.

Silage

We always like to have a buffer stock of silage in the yard to see us through an extended winter but it has been nearly completely wiped out this spring so we are trying to make as much silage as possible this year.

Silage was cut the first week of July and crops were quite decent. So far we have around 450 bales in the yard from 60 acres and we have pitted a further 85 acres which we have calculated as giving us 930 tonnes.

We have a further 26 acres to bale this coming week and hope to get a further 200 bales from it. There will be a final 15 acres to cut in august, some second cut and some paddocks that will be taken out. This should leave us in a good situation heading into the winter. Hopefully it won’t all be needed but it’s better to have it safe in the yard that have to go out looking for it next March. We are also trying to increase numbers slightly so our requirement will be greater.

Purchased heifers with calves

In June we purchased 16 heifers with calves at foot. They came home at a cost of just over £1,900 per unit. We are delighted with them and how they have kicked on since arriving here. It’s mainly Limousin calves and they are growing well and going to have decent conformation. We have put the heifers back to one of the Charolais bulls for next year.

There is just one cow left to calve. Of the 58 cows that went to the bull just one scanned empty, however, there is one more that is not in calf. The summer herd starts on 1 May and most were calved in eight weeks. We have only had one cow calf in the last fortnight.

The bulls went out to the summer herd last week which is why we are glad to be able to get cows and calves onto after-grass. We want to give them a lift in nutrition so that they are bulling quickly to keep the calving pattern as tight as possible. The earlier we can get calves on the ground the better as it’s always the later ones you end up keeping for an extra few months.

Store sales

We sold 28 stores at Quoybrae at the sale in the second week of July. It was a difficult time to be selling cattle with the lack of grass about. We were quite tight here ourselves so we took the decision to sell. The steers averaged 409kg and made £865 while the heifers were 405kg and averaged £847.

We were happy with the weights of the cattle as these would have been last summer’s later calves and so were just over a year old. Lifetime daily liveweight gain for these would be around 0.95kg. While we are aiming for higher, these cattle due to being later born, would be below average in terms of thrive.

Midden

We are currently in the process of putting in a dung midden in the yard. It has always been a battle getting sheds mucked out in Janurary/February time with land being so wet. We hate making a mess of fields that we have worked so hard to clean up and make productive. This leaves us trying to grab days when there is a hard frost to get all the sheds cleaned out.

For this reason, the decision was taken to put in a midden in the yard to make things easier. It should help reduce the amount of bedding used as we will be able to muck out sheds as soon as needed and not have to wait for the weather. We have dug out a base 30m by 15m and space for a collection tank and we plan to concrete it in the coming weeks. Overall the cost will be in the mid-teens when all is said and done. However it is a job for life and if you add up the saved bedding costs, time spent carting dung around the farm and the loss of production from rutting fields and damaging drains during the winter it is money well spent in our eyes.

Focus

The focus for the next couple of months is to try and grow as much grass as we can to carry us as far into the winter period as possible if ground conditions allow. We are measuring grass growth, however, we had stopped for a couple of weeks while it was practically zero. There was a two week period that we did not measure and growth between the two grass walks was a dismal 8kgDM/ha/day. This time of year we would expect it to be around 40kgDM/ha/day.