The farm is at saturation point this week in Clara, with over 200mm of rain accumulating through the month of October leaving a lot of the farm untrafficable and the rest very vulnerable to damage.

The weather is still very mild though, so grass growth continues to power on ahead of target, building up a strong cover of grass on the farm that is, or at least was, due to be grazed off before the end of the year.

We will keep pushing as much grass as possible into the diet over the next few days and move to the driest paddocks on the farm to try to get through this wet spell of weather.

If it dries out a bit next week, we can continue with our autumn grazing plan. If necessary we can use the cubicles for as long as is practical to get through the autumn and feed whatever silage is needed to get through to the dry period.

The heaviest covers were grazed through early October and the bulk of the farm is closed up for the winter now, so most of the rest of the ground should be ok to carry through to the spring if we have to.

We won’t give up on it all just yet though. A dry week would turn things around very quickly, but there’s not much sign of an improvement on the current forecast.

We pushed hard with grazing through October, and ground that was grazed through the first three weeks of the month has very little damage done to it and is well set up for the spring.

Last week, it was more of a struggle to leave ground in good condition for the spring. Next week looks tougher again, so we might have to just leave it for a while, rather than snooker ourselves from spring grass.

Drying off

We will have to start drying off in-calf cows from next week to give an adequate break to them over the dry period, which will help to reduce the herd size a bit and maybe help with grazing.

We have a final milk recording to do this week, which should help us to keep pushing on with selective dry cow therapy.

We were happy with last year’s results, with less than half of the cows getting dry cow tubes. Hopefully this year will go as well.

We sent another batch of cull cows to the factory this week and will get a few more away through the rest of the month of November.

With both beef price and milk price strong, it’s a juggling act between getting these cows finished before the winter and getting as much milk as possible into the tank.

Building condition

We have been milking all of the cull cows once-a-day through the autumn, and that is definitely helping to build condition on them while still milking and shortening the finishing period significantly.

The milk from these girls is also more than paying for the concentrate that they are eating, so that has worked very well for us this year.

The younger animals on the farm are moving through ground very quickly in this weather as well, so we will see an early enough winter for them if things don’t change.

The sheds are there and ready for them so we will just go with the flow and house them as they get to the end of their final grazing rotation.