Ground conditions at Drumforber remain remarkably good for the time of year, with the dry cows all still outside roaming across the arable fields. Some gateways are starting look a bit untidy as the cows make their way to the water troughs, but on the whole, they are not making too much mess.

This has really helped to reduce the feeding and bedding costs. Although this is not the solution for every year (with them having been housed for nearly a month by now due to ground conditions last year) we will certainly make the most of it going forward. Every opportunity to not have cows in sheds is an opportunity to save on cost.

On the subject of costs, we are looking our bedding costs again this year. Last year, we made extensive use of woodchip for dry cows and youngstock. However, the woodchip price has risen and at £95/t, it is marginal using it for the cattle and we are only using it for some of the stock. This means we are back to using straw. With this in mind, we are demonstrating a bale shredder for the front of the forklift to see if we can extend the life of the straw under the cattle. So far, we are very pleased with it. The other advantage here is that we have more flexibility with the muck. We will continue to use some chip and some straw going forward with a balance being played by cost and flexibility.

Straw and syrup diets

Another change we have made for this season is to use straw and syrup diets for the dry cows and not ammonia straw. As we have moved back to more straw bedding, we are keen to keep our options open with straw availability across the business. We already have the tank on farm, so it is not a great issue to change and we managed to secure our syrup needs early in the season before things became tight. We are feeding some of this spread on top of straw bales to the dry cows outside just now to keep them ticking over.

Again this year, we used the QuietWean nose flaps on the calves. We have now used them the last two years and we find that the calves are weaned from their mothers with no fuss and very little signs of stress. It is a little more work putting the flaps in but we do it at the same time as we are doing the pneumonia vaccine, meaning there are no extra handlings.

Calves are a little lighter this year at weaning, however, the average age of them would be nearly two months less. All in all, we are happy enough with weaning weights.

Bulls

Bulls will all go on to a growing diet to stretch out their frames until new year. At that point, we will pick off the best pedigrees for continuing to grow on. The remainder will either go on to a finishing diet or we will sell them as store. This is a decision that we will make come the time, when we see how feed and bedding stocks are and how the market is looking.

As far as feed goes, the extended mild period through the back-end has meant that we are already ahead of the fodder budget we prepared earlier in the autumn. At the same time, we won’t count our chickens as there is plenty of time before we get back to grass and the weather could do anything between now and then. Our silages were analysed a few weeks back and the results are in Table 1.

Red clover

We are very disappointed with the red clover. The main reason for growing it was to grow more of our own protein and reduce the feed bill. Unfortunately, with the weather and the field it was in, it did not get off to a great start. Come the time of cutting, it was very disappointing and we will have to go in and patch in a few bits next spring due to complete failure of the crop to grow. Currently we have our neighbour’s lambs grazing the grass and clover down to help it tiller out and hopefully give us a better crop next year.

We also didn’t expect much from the second cut either as it was a very disappointing crop when it was cut, again thanks to the weather. The energy level on the analysis and the actual bale yield from the field were both short of expectations but given how it looked when we cut it, it was no surprise

First cut is pleasing with good energy levels and with the dry matter being nearly 50%, a bale will go a long way, helping to stretch out the fodder stocks over winter. Protein levels are a little on the low side but we can set the diets up to sort that.

Autumn calving has now finished and we had a much better calving than the spring. We are currently batching those cows and calves up in the sheds and they are started on to their winter diet.