The weather isn’t playing ball with us this week in Kilkenny, so the cows have been re-introduced to concrete over the last few days and confined to quarters since. We’ve had rain, snow, wind and generally cold and miserable weather to be out farming in. Hopefully things will improve next week, and we can get back out to grass even for a few hours most days.

There looks to be a few more heavy pulses of rain on the way through the weekend so we are probably looking at next week at the earliest to get them back out to grass, but we will walk a few paddocks every day and see how ground conditions are looking. The cubicles will have to suffice in the meantime.

Up to this week, we had been grazing full-time with the main herd and during the day with the freshly calved group. The cows have started the year well and seem to be milking well, although with numbers rising every day and the calves taking their share, it’s difficult to put an exact figure on it.

We are feeding a mixture of grass and maize silage while grazing is off limits and we have increased the concentrates to 6kg per day. We will try to keep the cows as well fed as possible through this tough period and hopefully we will pull through without too many issues. Hopefully we get no injuries around the cubicles where we’ve seen cows’ teats get walked on at times like this in the past.

We are well over the halfway point of calving now, and the automatic calf feeders will be getting busier from now on. We had a good run of heifer calves this year so we will start to sell a few from this week on to keep numbers under control. Bull calves are leaving the yard regularly now as well and hopefully this will all help to keep the workload manageable.

Three weeks to go

We are finishing up with the dairy-bred calves from the heifers this week and it will be all Aubrac and Angus calves from them from now on. The cows will have three more weeks of dairy calves before finishing up with Hereford and Aubrac calves. We are trying to avoid rearing late heifer calves and the beef breeds should be easy enough to sell later on.

Calf health and cow health is holding up very well so far, but these are the weeks where the pressure comes on. Cubicles will need extra attention while the cows are milking off them and the calf sheds needed extra bedding some mornings after snow blew in.

We were lucky enough to have some extra help arrive this week in the form of Bart, a student from Holland who spent some time with us in the summer on work placement. He arrived back for a week to see an Irish spring and managed to cram in everything from cows out day and night in early February to cows back fully housed again a week later.

Hopefully we didn’t frighten him off with 10 fresh calves some mornings to get started. It tends to be two or three a week on his home farm, and something similar on the university farm. He is back home this weekend but might return for a visit again.

Our night duty man finishes this weekend also as calving slows down, so this weather needs to improve quickly next week. We will have a busy three weeks ahead still with another 100 cows to calve. Hopefully night-time feeding of dry cows will minimise the sleep deprivation.

Read more

Farmer Writes: almost at the halfway point of intense calving

Farmer Writes: weather makes a mockery of calendar farming, again