Calving finally kicked off for us last Thursday and it turned out to be a nice gentle start with four heifers all mannerly enough to calve unassisted and during the day.

Our grazing platform is about five miles away from the main yard where we calve the cows, so every morning whoever has calved in the previous 24-hours is loaded into the trailer and brought to the farm with the parlour.

There's no doubt that this adds extra work on us compared with farmers that have all their facilities together, but in our circumstances we really had to be careful about capital expenditure while at the same time making the very most of the land we had available to ourselves.

Management

Once on the platform, cows are given 12-hour allocations of grass and supplemented with 3-4 kgs of a high energy concentrate and offered high quality surplus bales to appetite.

The main management tool we are using this time of the year is the spring rotation planner. Put simply, this will divide my farm into daily grazing allocations with the ultimate aim of having completely grazed out the farm by the first week in April when we will start our second grazing round.

If followed correctly, it will allow us to keep grass in the cow’s diet right up to the beginning of April when hopefully the farm will be growing enough grass to completely satisfy my herds grass demand.

Quota

Due to our quota position we are milking our cows once a day. We plan to continue this up until the last week in March. We are also feeding our calves’ whole milk this year and would hope to build them onto eight litres a day split into two feeds.

We have our figures done and would be fairly confident that by taking these two measures we will avoid, or at the very least minimise, a potential superlevy bill.

I have to say that milking the cows once a day is an absolutely massive labour saver at this time of year. We have more time to manage calving cows, train calves to drink, organise grazing allocations and get slurry spread. It also takes pressure off the cows, which I have to say seem to be benefiting from it as much as I am.

Milking once a day

At a recent dairy seminar organised by Teagasc Laurence Shalloo presented a study that showed by milking cows once a day from the beginning of lactation up to the last week in March would result in a projected reduction in milk solids produced of 8.5%.

I wonder what would be the yield decrease by just milking once a day for February? Could it be used on my farm in the future as a management tool to help cope with the heavy spring workload? At the minute it’s too soon to tell but I will be watching my cows closely over the next six weeks and I will definitely give it serious consideration in the future.