With the weather forecast for the coming week promising dry and cold conditions, it's given us a great chance to get the cows out grazing day and night and begin to make progress on getting 30% of the grazing platform grazed by 1 March.

Cows are being fed 2 kilos of concentrate at milking and we have removed silage from the diet for the time being anyway. If we need to slow down cows we will reintroduce it at a late date. With a lot of heifers calving down early things were a bit hairy in the parlour for a week or so, but now with more cows joining the milking herd things have calmed down a good bit. They've also put manners on a couple of the more boisterous girls.

Back in-calf

From the day a cow calves down here, our attention focuses straight away on maximising her chances at going back in-calf. Cows are watched closely for any excessive loss in body condition and anything needing a washout is treated straight away.

Cows or heifers that have been handled at calving time or that might have had a difficult calving or noted and washed out regardless of her symptoms about a week after calving. We find this works very well and it is one of the key management practices that helps us a achieve a high 21 day submission rate during breeding.

Calf rearing

Our calves are thriving well and I have no doubt that the extra time we have as a result of once a day milking is contributing to that.

Newborn calves here are grouped in twos and reared on calf crates for the first few days. They are given 2 litres a milk twice daily and when they are drinking that amount strong we increase it to 3 litres twice daily. Once they have adapted to the increased feed for two days, they are moved to a group pen. It's at this stage we introduce a calf starter ration, we would hope that once a group pen is filled that we can start to build them up slowly to two 4 litre feeds a day.

With shed space limited we have began using a stable that's not in use at the minute and they have access to a yard day and night so at the minute they have the best of both worlds.

Whether your a dairy farmer, suckler farmer, drystock farmer or a tillage farmer it's the same for us all we are entering the busiest, most rewarding and stressful time of the year. With this in mind, I would just like to take this opportunity to wish you the best of luck and above all stay safe.