Spring has definitely been in the air over the last few weeks, with mild sunny weather driving exceptional grass growth and helping us to keep the cows and maiden heifers out grazing full time.

Early compact calving creates a high enough demand however, so we will keep the handbrake on grazing allocations for the moment with 6kgs of concentrate in the parlour and ad-lib silage at milking time making up the deficit.

Grass has visibly moved forward this week though with a strong response to slurry, urea and grazing. The first of the grazed paddocks are really activating and coming out of dormancy very quickly.

The cold weather forecast for next week will slow this down a bit, but it’s nice to get this early bounce in February to hopefully set the farm up very well for the second grazing rotation in April.

When we get a good spring like this, we often forget to enjoy it while worrying about what’s around the corner.

Cow health is exceptional for the most part, with cows already showing strong heats after calving and really starting to pump out milk.

When we get a good spring like this, we often forget to enjoy it while worrying about what’s around the corner.

It might get cold next week and we might even get snow or floods the following week to “make up” for these pet days but there’s not much point in spending our time worrying about it.

Milk price is the other big worry this week, with significant drops announced right across the country.

This will take a while to bottom out and we will probably see further drops over the next couple of months. We were very lucky last year that prices tracked up very strongly with farm inputs.

The worry on the way down is that milk price seems to be falling a lot quicker than the inputs at the moment.

Markets are stabilising however, so hopefully we won’t see too much of a fall off with milk before peak supplies are delivered through April, May and June.

Forward buying

The other benefit to last year’s high prices was that a lot of people forward bought a significant amount of this year’s inputs. Hopefully this will insulate us from the downturn a bit and help to smooth over the bump in the road to some extent.

Fertiliser, energy and feed costs look to be on a very different trajectory to milk price for the moment, with a much more stubborn peak.

International prices seem to be falling significantly, especially for fertiliser, but the farmgate price is staying very strong.

With a lot of product forward sold from last year, at record margins, there is little pressure on merchants to chase this market early in the year.

Hopefully as the year progresses, we will see some new product delivered at a more reasonable price point and hopefully this saving will be passed on to farmers.

In other news, we tried a new (to us) method of dehorning calves this spring on the farm which has worked very well. Under veterinary supervision, we first injected the calves with a sedative that put them to sleep very quickly.

We then administered 2ml of local anaesthetic to the horn nerve followed by 2ml of a painkiller.

The calves were then very easily held and disbudded as usual with the gas dehorning iron.

There was no need for a crate or any other restraint. While the calves were out, we could also check navels and extra teats etc. The whole procedure was very quick and very easy on both man and beast.

It is definitely worth considering, especially with the current labour shortage on Irish farms.