The drought is really taking hold in the southeast this week, with temperatures reaching the mid-20s most days.

Grass re-growth is almost non-existent on recently grazed ground and anywhere that there is limestone near the surface is burning up completely.

Stronger covers on deeper soils are hanging in a bit better, but it’s all on borrowed time, with very little rain in the forecast.

We have the full milking platform available for grazing, with all young stock moved off and all silage ground coming back into the rotation.

We have some of this silage ground fertilised for a second cut, but if nothing changes, we will have to graze it over the next few weeks.

We will probably mix it with lower-fertiliser paddocks as they are grazed to avoid any nitrate issues.

Stronger covers on deeper soils are hanging in a bit better, but it’s all on borrowed time

We are feeding 4kg of meal and grass only for the moment, but if nothing changes, we will have to increase the meal feeding and add some wraps to the diet next week.

Cows are hanging in around 2kg of milk solids with protein holding at 3.5%, despite a lot of stressed stems appearing in the sward.

The young stock are all doing well for the moment. The heifer block has a good cover of grass as we left some stronger paddocks in the system, rather than bale them two weeks ago.

We will graze through this over the next month or if we get enough rain, we can quickly take some of them out as wraps.

The calves have been dosed and moved to the far end of the farm for a month or so until our herd test is due.

We can’t wait for water to run out some day before addressing the problem

Water is another worry with all these groups of animals. We will probably have to bore a new well on the home farm in the near future, as the herd size increases.

Hopefully, the outside blocks hold up a bit better. These extended dry periods that we have been seeing over the last few years are exposing any cracks in the system. We’ll have to be proactive on this – we can’t wait for water to run out some day before addressing the problem.

Glanbia

We have to remember to thank Glanbia this week for a very generous biodiversity payment on our April milk of 0.2c/l.

This was an “unconditional” payment to all suppliers, which amounts to a little over €100 to the average milk supplier in the Glanbia catchment area. Not enough to bring anyone away for the weekend, but sure it might stretch to a night out in a local restaurant.

Not enough to bring anyone away for the weekend, but sure it might stretch to a night out in a local restaurant

We can all pat ourselves on the back for doing a great job on biodiversity, for planting trees, reducing our carbon footprint, maintaining hedgerows and fencing off watercourses.

This is a reward for all the hard work done by suppliers over the last few years.

And as a special bonus, even those farmers who never planted a tree or worried about their carbon footprint get paid the bonus too.

This is an interesting concept from Glanbia, to reward everyone, without any checks or balances and it must be inspired by the latest thinking in underage sport, where everyone gets a participation medal and a goodie bag at the end of the game.

Maybe consider paying a strong milk price that supports all of the biodiversity investment needed on-farm

One would have assumed that the way to highlight the biodiversity progress on farms would be to use pictures and videos showing best practice and illustrating examples of wildlife thriving alongside cows.

Maybe sponsoring an award to highlight the extraordinary lengths to which some farms are going to preserve wildlife habitat would also be worth looking into.

And then maybe consider paying a strong milk price that supports all of the biodiversity investment needed on-farm and that does not need retrospective top-ups to take us out of the relegation zone.