We have had about 40mm of rain on the farm in Clara last weekend, so we are starting to see some green shoots appear across the paddocks again over the last few days. Hopefully, it’s enough to kickstart the grass properly again but with the temperatures forecast to rise again next weekend, it might be just a temporary respite from the drought.

We might get a few more millimetres before the weekend to help the situation and hopefully we can get back to measuring grass from next week onwards but, for the moment, we will continue to measure the rain and continue to feed the cows heavily.

The advice from the areas of New Zealand prone to drought is to keep feeding the cows heavily after the drought breaks for two weeks or so, to allow grass to get ahead of the cows again. The diet feeder won’t be parked up for another week or two to allow this to happen, so the diet this week again consists of 6kg of dairy nuts in the parlour and 6kg of beet pulp nuts with 5kg to 6kg of pit silage mixed through the diet feeder and fed in the feed passageways after both milkings, every day.

We will wait another few weeks to do a final tally on where this will leave us with winter feed, but at this stage, it’s not looking great.

We have an option of buying some Westerwolds grass for silage from a tillage farmer nearby. This is going in between winter and spring crops and if it gets established well it should fill whatever gap we have left in the feed budget.

We passed our TB test last week, which is a big relief as it leaves our options open to de-stock to some extent before the winter. We also scanned the herd early this week to give us a better opportunity to make some better culling decisions earlier this year.

The scan results were very good considering the year we’ve come through. Ten per cent of the cows were not in calf or empty after a 10-week breeding season, with 5% of the heifers also failing to hold to the bulls in that time.

The good news is that 85% of the herd is due to calve in six weeks again next spring and we have enough animals in-calf to do some selective culling on top of the enforced ones.

We will see what demand is like for the empty cows over the next few days. As usual, there is a mix of good young cows in this batch, as well as some older ones with plenty of mileage on the clock. The decision is easy enough with the older cows. They will be put in the shed for heavy concentrate feeding or sold to someone else to do the same thing.

Demand

There might be some demand for the younger cows to be milked for a while or to be put into an autumn breeding programme, but they will all be moved off the milking roster here over the next few weeks, wherever they go. It’s always disappointing to see these otherwise healthy young cows going on to the cull list, but this year isn’t the time for complacency.

We will also pull out the handful of cows selected for culling on production and conformation by the end of August and get down to keeping only the hardcore number of cows that we want to carry through the winter and milk again next season.

We will have to get more ruthless with these decisions this year as there will be very little surplus feed in the system. Desperate times call for desperate measures.