The summer has arrived in the southeast at last.

Grass is growing out over the ditches and every silage harvesting machine available has been pushed into service over the last few days to replace the stocks burned up through the long winter.

Everything gets very busy and very urgent with the first few fine days at this time of year but things should settle down a bit after that.

There will be a lot of diesel and rubber burned over the next few weeks, with a lot of pressure on to get the 2023 silage crop into the pit in as good condition as possible.

Long days and long weeks will be needed to get the job done, but, most importantly, hopefully everyone stays safe both on the roads and around farmyards through the busy period.

We are waiting a few more days here to start the main cut as some of the silage fields need to bulk up a bit more after we grazed them a second time in early April.

We might bale a few of the grazing paddocks while we wait and get some quality coming back on the grazing platform to keep milk quality right.

Ground conditions under the silage crops need every day they can get as well, with some paddocks still very soft.

A few more fine days will both bulk up the yield and dry up the soil before we move in with the heavy machinery and we’ll be looking for another couple of dry days then again.

Breeding

The breeding season is progressing well over the last few weeks. We had the last of the cows not served on a fertility programme over the last week, so all are served now and it’s fingers crossed then that enough of them hold in-calf early for next spring.

The repeats have been running at about 30% most days which would be excellent if it was a final figure, but we will no doubt get plenty of surprises over the next few weeks, with cows repeating at irregular intervals.

Most of the systems out there now are very accurate, whether it’s a collar, tag or bolus

Hopefully enough of them hold and we get a good response from the extra effort put into the breeding season over the last few weeks. There was a cost factor to the scanning and hormone treatments and also a big workload factor to drafting out bunches of cows for treatments on successive days.

Our Cowmanager heat detection system is another important factor in trying to achieve better fertility results this year.

We have had some battery issues with a batch of tags which had to be replaced under warranty, but the heat detection element of the system has been exceptional again this year.

Most of the systems out there now are very accurate, whether it’s a collar, tag or bolus, and when used alongside a good drafting gate, they can take a huge amount of work out of the breeding season and improve the accuracy of timing of AI.

The heat detection and drafting systems also help us to keep breeding with AI for most of the season without increasing the workload significantly.

This should allow us to breed with high-beef-index bulls right through May and June and hopefully breed a very saleable beef calf for next February and March.