There is still a big hole left in the budget for the year but it’s a pleasure to walk out into fields of cattle and cows at this time of the year with good clean-outs after grazing, all hooves on top of the ground and no damage being done. Problems getting the temporary fencing stakes into the ground are definitely first world problems!

The forecast looks a bit different for next week with rain showing up for the middle of the week, but we’ll make the best of it while it lasts. It’s been a great time to get field work done also, with tractors barely marking the ground and hopefully we can get the last of our winter feed in while the going is so good with the Italian ryegrasses and Westerwolds ready to cut this week.

We are following the cows with slurry for the final time this week and the last of the dung went out behind the heifers earlier in the week. The extension to slurry, dung and fertiliser dates was a great move and the question needs to be asked why not use these dates every year. The later application of Nitrogen in particular has pushed on a lot of grass growth late in the year, so we will have to keep this monitored as we decide on closing dates for the winter.

Paddocks closed as normal in early October have heavy covers of grass on them already, so they might need another clean out before we house cows fully. We will watch grass covers carefully over the next month and try to balance things between closing with enough grass on the whole farm for next spring and not having too heavy a cover on any individual paddock.

Milking

We are still milking the cows twice a day and probably won’t switch to once-a-day until mid-November. They are still producing 15l at 5.31% fat and 4.18% protein or 1.46kg of solids. They have dropped a lot over the last week from 1.65kg to 1.46kg as we use strip wires more to make them work a bit harder to clean out paddocks, but they seem to have settled at that now.

The herd is due to start calving on 20 January and went in-calf very quickly so that will start to impact milk production in a big way from now on. Condition score isn’t a factor with drying off this year, but we will have to start keeping an eye on calving dates from the middle of November and there are more twins than usual, so we will keep these monitored also.

We should be able to keep the heifers and weanlings out grazing for another month, but the weather will have a big say in that. We have some re-seeds to graze with the younger ones especially so hopefully we can get them cleaned out before too much rain arrives. We have some after-grass left on the heifer block to bulk up for a while yet.

Hopefully we can strip-graze this towards the end of November and get a bit of value out of it before housing. These heifers are in great condition after the summer, so we are trying to push them harder with clean-outs while the weather is so good. Some of the younger weanlings on the other hand are a bit behind target so they will be selected out for meal feeding this week to keep them moving forward.