This is a subscriber-only article
We are having a very busy week at home in Clara this week trying to sandwich the Moorepark event and a grant application for a milking parlour upgrade in between our annual TB test and the second cut silage.
Fodder
We also knocked some hay just to fill in any gaps that might appear in the schedule.
It’s great to be building a fodder reserve again this year after the huge deficit we experiencedthis time last year. Having said that, the milking platform is drying out again every day and grass growth is dropping off rapidly as we move into July.
We have increased concentrates from 2kg to 4kg as a first step to reduce demand. We will have to push in some bales next week, if we don’t get rain by then, but after the mild winter and good spring, we are much better positioned to fill those gaps this year than last.
Hopefully the dry spell will be short lived and we can get back to strong growth levels reasonably quickly. We have grass to graze for the rest of this week, so we will reassess everything next week to see what we need to do to fill the deficit.
The breeding season is winding down this week. The cows have quietened a lot over the last few days so we will pull the bulls next week from both the heifers and the cows and hopefully scan in a month to see how they performed.
Moorepark
The Moorepark event had a huge attendance as usual, and rightly so, as we move into an era where dairy farms are coming under more and more scrutiny. We need to keep ourselves informed about where we are at in terms of our environmental and climate footprint and what we need to do to improve it.
The trailing shoe demonstration was a big attraction as we get pushed towards that technology by regulation.
The benefits of the trailing shoe, including capturing more of the Nitrogen from the slurry and keeping the grass cleaner, were there for all to see.
This sort of technology and the protected urea option is a win-win for us. It makes us more efficient as farmers and also ticks the climate action box for us.
It allows us to paint a better picture of our production model to our consumers both at home and abroad.
The underlying message from the day from a farm management point of view, was that the steady 2.5 cows to the hectare overall farm stocking rate is still the safest bet out there.
The steady business with a sufficient quantity of home grown forage in a normal year and the ability to build a reserve in a good year is the way to go.
The top operators in that system, with good grassland management, good cost control and good breeding programmes in place, whatever the breed, have the ability to throw off the highest level of consistent repeatable profit over a period of time.
We were well warned about systems creeping towards higher stocking rates and higher inputs with marginal return on investment.
The traditional cow to the acre stocking rate that has stood Irish farmers in such good stead for generations is still the way forward, just done as efficiently as possible with the necessary improvements towards our environmental footprint.
SHARING OPTIONS: