We have seen exceptional grass growth on the farm for the last month, with surplus bales of silage taken out almost every week. Our second cut was also harvested last week, after grazing most of it between cuts.

After a slow start to the year in the southeast, our grass growth has caught up very quickly and we now look to have plenty of winter feed on hand.

With the exceptional growth, we also had to top some paddocks during the last rotation, so most of the farm has been either mowed for bales or topped during the last month. Grass quality should be easy enough to keep on top of for the rest of the year with very little topping needed, but we’ll see how it goes.

Cows are milking well enough at 1.85kg of solids from 1.5kg of meal

The last month was more like June than July, so we could still see plenty of surplus coming to hand before the end of the growing season. The grass growth curve for the last few years doesn’t bear much resemblance to what we learned in school so we could still see anything happen over the next few months.

Cows are milking well enough at 1.85kg of solids from 1.5kg of meal, and are doing that consistently for over a month now with a high proportion of young cows in the herd. If they can continue to hold at that for the next few weeks and give us a good scan in mid-August, it could turn out to be a great year, despite the shaky start.

We have two more rounds of fertiliser to get out now before the closing date

We have a few areas of the farm that need freshening up, so we will try to get them sprayed this week and sown early in the month to get them back into the rotation for the autumn.

We will spray off these paddocks a week before cutting them for bales and sow the grass seed, an Abergain/clover mix, into the bare sward.

We have two more rounds of fertiliser to get out now before the closing date so we will probably go with protected urea again in early August and before the deadline in September.

Parlour

Our parlour upgrade is near completion this week and we should see it turned on early in August.

We are putting a fair bit of technology into this parlour and we are also considering adding a heat-detection system for the milking herd before the next breeding season. This technology is improving all of the time and, hopefully, we can find a system that will both detect heat and automatically draft out the cows for breeding.

Farming is moving rapidly away from the romantic image of someone standing out in a field

With numbers of cows increasing on the farm, we need to be a bit smarter with our use of time so we will need to use technology more to measure and manage herd performance. We will also look at using more automation for slurry management through the winter period.

Automation and technology comes with a price tag but hopefully we can get a return on investment through reduced labour, reduced inputs and increased performance. It will, however, increase the proportion of time spent in the office or looking at screens. Farming is moving rapidly away from the romantic image of someone standing out in a field or driving a tractor to a larger proportion of office work every year.