This year the spring herd grazed as three groups throughout the season and at this stage two of the three groups are housed and weaned. They were all brought in nearly a month ago for their pneumonia vaccination.

The routine at weaning time is they are brought in, separated and housed each side of the straw-bedded court. Calves are offered the best-quality silage we have and we feed concentrate on top of this each day. There is plenty of room for all calves to feed, and they are used to the concentrate as it is the same as was in the creep feeder.

The reason we don’t simply place the creep feeder in the court is that when feeding them at one time you can see every calf eat and it makes identifying any sickness much easier if one doesn’t come forward to feed.

After a couple of days on straw, once the calves are well settled, they move onto the slatted pens where they will remain for the winter.

The final batch of cows and calves still at grass have enough to keep them going for another few days, however, if the weather is to change we will get them in and weaned as soon as possible. If there is still grass to be grazed we can put out some dry cows or the ewe lambs can mop it up over the winter.

We take a housing weight of everything which will in effect be the weaning weight for the calves. We can then correct for the age of the calf and compare the performance of each cow-calf unit throughout the season. As we continue to do this year on year, it begins to build up a picture as to which cows are producing the goods consistently and which ones are not up to scratch. From this, culling and breeding decisions can be made. We will look at this data in our next farm update, once weaning is complete.

Table 1 shows the weaning figures for the spring herd over the last three years. We are very happy with the current performance of the herd. We keep things as simple as possible here and try to do the basics right. That’s not to say we don’t lose calves – every farm does. We had four sets of twins in the spring herd which helped boost the number of calves weaned but four from 93 cows it is nothing out of the ordinary.

Cow condition

The cows on the other side of the court are offered some silage and straw ad libitum to aid drying off. Cow condition is quite good across all the cows. One batch are slightly leaner than the other two, however, these were the leanest cows at turnout which were batched together for grazing.

This was the first group in for weaning to reduce the pressure on the cows. While they have significantly improved in condition since turnout, it is interesting to see that they haven’t fully caught up to the rest of the cows.

The leaner group on average are just under a body condition score (BCS) of 3 (scale of 1-5, where 1 is no fat reserve and 5 is fat as can be). Ideally they would be closer to 3.5 at housing time, which is where the majority of the cows in the other two groups are currently.

Having a build-up of condition coming into the winter is like having money in the bank. We can slowly manage the use of some of this condition over the winter period to reduce winter feed costs and have cows calving down at a target condition score of 2.5.

Cows will be batched according to BCS once everything is housed and fed accordingly. Calving at BCS 2.5 means cows are fit for calving and have enough reserves to produce sufficient amounts of colostrum and milk while not being overly fat that is going to cause greater calving difficulties.

Lambs

The 420 ewe lambs that are wintered here arrived earlier this month. They will graze the farm strategically once again this winter, finishing with the silage fields that cannot be cut until July 1 and must be closed by the end of March in a bid to improve the silage quality. Grazing these fields hard up to the closing date means there is no old stemmy grass coming in with the silage.

Silage

We have done the same thing this year to try and improve silage quality which has seemed to have has a positive effect. The main-cut silage analysis came back at 36% DM, 10.7 ME, and 11.1% protein giving a D-value of 67. This quality silage is suitable for both cows and growing stock.

Grazing season review

Despite the year being quite difficult for a lot of the country, the conditions have fallen just right for us here. We managed to get enough rainfall at the critical times and, in other years, where we would usually be battling long wet spells, poor grazing conditions and damaging fields, this year has been ideal for getting the most from the grass.

Even still we haven’t started feeding the summer-calving herd that are wintered on the hill. They have enough grass ahead of them to see them into early November – this will have a massive saving effect on fodder this winter.

As one grazing season finishes we look towards the next. We need to have animals at pasture for as many days in the year as possible. There is some fencing to be done over the winter months to split up more ground and put more paddocks into the system. We will be planning for as early a turnout as possible, obviously it will depend on what the weather has in store for us next year but at least if we are prepared for an early spring, we can take advantage of it.

Scanning

Once weaning is done the next job will be to get all the cows scanned. We hope to get that done in the next few weeks. Hopefully we will calve over 100 cows in the spring herd next year. There are 14 heifers to be scanned and hopefully the majority of these will be in calf. We also bought in 16 heifers with calves at foot during the summer to boost cow numbers.

Last week we culled eight cows that were marked for going since spring. They didn’t see a bull this year. They were culled for age, calf quality and milkiness, and there are a further two to go once weaned from the summer herd for poor temperament. There is no room for these cows on farm, they are not worth the hassle.

It is dangerous for the farmer, who is often working alone and having a young family around the farm, they are better off culled.