We are finally building up a good cover of grass on the milking platform this autumn with 950kg DM/ha available to the cows as we start the last grazing rotation of the year this week. This is a good bit behind last year’s figure, but grass quality is excellent this year and cows are still milking very well.

We are feeding 5kg of concentrate to keep building covers and stretching out grass as far as possible into the autumn. With the farm still very dry under foot we should be able to keep cows out grazing for a good while yet, unless some other disaster turns up over the next few weeks.

The plan is to graze 60% of the farm by the end of October and then we will slow down the cows further with a small amount of wrapped silage and some beet pulp nuts. This is to try to stretch the remaining 40% of the grazing platform out for as long as we can and keep as many cows as possible milking until the last few days before Christmas.

With protein over 4% and fat over 5% already, the milk should easily cover the feed costs and we can hopefully keep them milking and away from a high silage dry-cow diet for as long as possible. The condition score of the herd is exceptional after all the summer feeding so we will include a high proportion of straw throughout the dry period this year to stretch the silage that is available.

The maize silage yielded very well and quality looks excellent in the pit so that should keep the spring demand for feed well under control with some extra meal feeding, if necessary. This will be fed to the freshly calved cows through February, March and April to buffer-graze grass until magic day, whenever that arrives next year.

Concentrates and dry cow feed

The weanling heifers will get 3kg of concentrate from the start of the winter to stretch their silage. Most of them are well on target for weight so we might be able to put a small amount of straw or straw pellets through their feed to keep those batches from getting over-conditioned.

It’s probably the dry cow feed that is in the shortest supply this winter here, so we will look at the option of feeding something like maize meal with the silage and straw to stretch it further if the winter closes in too quickly. If we get a good back end for grazing, we should be OK without this option.

Beef industry

There’s a lot of anger out there at farmer meetings with the state of the beef industry. Lack of meaningful Government supports and erosion of subsidies are one side of the problem, but the price paid by the factories for top-quality beef is a bigger issue in my opinion.

We complain about our dairy co-ops at times but the structure of dairy co-operatives that dairy farmers sell product through is light years ahead of what is facing beef farmers when they bring their product out to market.

It’s imperative that Irish beef producers find some way to unite and come together to find strength in numbers and to push for a better price now before we lose a whole generation of full-time farmers in that sector. The situation is unfortunately getting more difficult every year.

It was a long hard road for our ancestors to set up co-operatives for agricultural produce, but if they could get it done 100 years ago it has to be possible to develop some version of that system now to strengthen the hand of the beef farmer when they go to market.