It’s amazing how well things dried around here last week. Autumn can be a really nice time of year if you get reasonable weather.

Cows are calving away and with the amount of grass still in fields last weekend, I was almost tempted to start putting calved cows back out to grass.

It’s great to get newborn calves a couple of weeks at grass before being housed for the winter. It really gets them off to a great start.

The rain we got in the following days put an end to that thought pretty quickly though.

It’s not far off being dark when I leave for work in the morning and there really isn’t a lot of daylight left in the evening when I get home either, so trying to feed and check stock in the fields at this time of year can be a bit of a pain. There’s a lot to be said for the comfort of concrete and LED lights!

Feed mixes

At this point, calved cows are getting 2kg of meal, along with ad-lib silage. They are just getting the same beef mix that the weanlings are on, but as soon as I get myself organised, I’ll move them on to the usual barley and soya mix.

The beef mix is handy at the moment because it’s what I have in the yard, but it's just not high enough in protein to expect any great level of milk to be produced.

As soon as I get my silage analysis back, I’ll decide what level of meal feeding I want cows to settle on.

Silage looks good, but, as we all know, looking at it means nothing. Sixty DMD silage can smell lovely, but it won’t keep much flesh on stock.

I was absolutely delighted with performance since the last weighing

Weanling bulls were weighed, clipped and housed in the last few days. I have to say I was absolutely delighted with performance since the last weighing six weeks ago.

The average daily gain for the batch was 1.63kg/day on grass and 3kg to 4kg of meal.

In fairness, gut fill is probably making this look slightly better than it actually is, as they were weighed going out of the shed five weeks ago and were weighed coming in off grass this time. But even allowing for this, it is still excellent performance.

BEAM stocking rate

Up until last week, it was my intention to finish these bulls, but I got my Teagasc adviser to put some figures on my stocking rate for the BEAM scheme and he tells me that I might need to get rid of more stock than I had previously thought.

Something I need to take a closer look at sooner rather than later, but, no more than any other farmer, I don’t want to be giving money back to the Department at any cost, so a change of plan may be needed!