We’ve had excellent weather for grazing over the last couple of weeks in Clara. While grass got tight for a few days, it has really jumped out of the ground with the heat last weekend so we will look at skipping over a few paddocks soon.

There is some rain forecast for this weekend which is wanted in this part of the country and should keep grass moving forward into May and hopefully the good weather will return in time for the silage season.

It’s been a great start to the year so hopefully it will continue.

Breeding

Breeding season started 10 days ago with the milking herd and five days ago with the maiden heifers. We have half of the milking herd submitted in the first 10 days so hopefully we will see over 90% submitted in the first cycle of 21 days. Cow condition is excellent and they are showing very strong heats so hopefully we will get a good conception rate as well.

We used some sexed straws for the first week of breeding and a small bit of beef semen will go in over the first three weeks, with a switch to more beef over the second cycle of breeding. We then have Hereford and Aubrac bulls to tidy up for the last four weeks.

We have two thirds of this year’s replacements weaned and out grazing already and these girls should hit their target weights for breeding in 12 months’ time

The heifers were divided up into groups of 30 with an unrelated Friesian stock bull left with each group. The Friesian bulls will get three weeks with the heifers before being sold off and Angus bulls will tidy up for the last six weeks. We should get plenty of good quality, early heifer calves this way and have no replacements born after the end of February.

We have two thirds of this year’s replacements weaned and out grazing already and these girls should hit their target weights for breeding in 12 months’ time without too much extra expense.

The later calves will be weaned over the next few weeks and hopefully we don’t have too many stragglers at the end.

The late calves will come into target weight with a bit of extra attention, but often eat twice as much meal and take twice as much labour to get to target so we will phase these out of the system.

We might AI with beef alongside the beef stock bulls with the cows if they look to be slowing down

With bigger numbers on the farm every year, everything needs to be more streamlined and complications removed.

We might AI with beef alongside the beef stock bulls with the cows if they look to be slowing down. The biggest issue with pedigree beef bulls is that they struggle to walk long distances with the herd so we will just have to manage that a bit if we want to cut out the late Friesian calves.

Greenfield

Finally it was disappointing to see the Greenfield Farm project could come to an end in our parish. A lot of lessons have been learned over the last 10 years of the project. The investment might have been a bit light at the start and the cost of producing a litre of milk in reality was found to be a lot higher than anticipated at the outset.

The project will conclude this year, hopefully in amicable fashion, but it will not be the end of milk production on the farm

However, it was always a great learning resource for new entrants and even established farmers planning on increasing in scale.

The project will conclude this year, hopefully in amicable fashion, but it will not be the end of milk production on the farm.

Grass will continue to grow and cows will continue to be milked and hopefully the farm will go from strength to strength over the coming years.