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This year will hang around in the memory banks for a long time, with grass growth continuing to be challenging all the way through.
It doesn’t look like we’ll be hearing too many stories this autumn of farms growing the 18t and 19t of grass that we had last year, but such are the vagaries of farming and we will just have to soldier on through it as best we can.
After the extreme wet weather in the spring, it’s hard to believe that we are now facing into a drought a short few weeks later on most of the dry farms in the country.
Most farms were OK up to last week or the week before, but a lack of any significant volume of rain in June has seen demand for grass push well ahead of growth and expensive supplementary feeding starting to come into the equation again.
With June being the main grass growing month of the year and probably the most important month for growing winter feed annually, it’s difficult to see where all the feed needed for next winter will come from.
At the moment, all the time and effort is being spent on the icing, but the cake is being forgotten about and it’s starting to taste very sour
Maize crops are even showing signs of moisture deficit at this stage and spring-sown tillage crops look to be growing very little straw, whatever about grain this season.
At home, grass growth and quality have fallen off a cliff over the past two weeks on the milking platform and stem is popping up from moisture stress everywhere again, despite a lot of ground being baled last month.
The highest cover is 1,200kg on some of the wetter paddocks, but this will disappear early this week with a big drop behind it.
The drizzle we’ve been getting is keeping the grass green and alive for the moment, so that if we got rain, it would turn quickly.
The forecast, though, is for sun and high temperatures this week, which, if it happens, will finish growth completely.
We are feeding 5kg of an 18% protein nut since last weekend to try to reduce demand and to hold production, and the next option normally would be to start feeding silage.
However, our second-cut is at a nice stage of growth at the moment, so we are firstly looking at the option of zero grazing that back to the cows to keep better-quality feed in front of them and to avoid opening precious bales or opening up the first-cut pit silage for the moment.
Cows are continuing to milk reasonably well at 25l, with 4% fat and 3.46% protein, but, again, this will be hard to hold as grass gets more stressed over the next week or so.
Heifers and calves will run tight with grass too in this weather, with the reseeded ground on the heifer block especially slow to get going. The seedlings are up, but badly in need of a drink to get them moving.
No matter which way we go, it’s all expense and it’s all eating into the winter feed stocks, so we will have to monitor that situation closely over the next few months.
We have some extra maize silage due in this year, so hopefully that will perform well enough to get us out of trouble.
To add to the mix, we’ve had another cent taken off our base milk price last month by Glanbia.
It’s a disappointing place to be with a company that does so much so well and should be in a position to perform so much better.
Every month and every year we hope for an improvement and tell ourselves it can’t get any worse, but we are consistently disappointed.
The base price every month is the cake; all the other little schemes, bonuses and top-ups are just the icing.
At the moment, all the time and effort is being spent on the icing, but the cake is being forgotten about and it’s starting to taste very sour.
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