Listening to a Met Éireann forecast this week, I learned that we have progressed from a cold snap last week to a cold spell at the start of this week and will progress on to an extended cold spell by the end of this week if it continues.

It’s been cold for a good while now, in layman’s terms.

It hasn’t been too much of an inconvenience so far on the farm thankfully, with most of the water troughs functioning well enough to keep all stock in good health and after a few frozen pipes in the parlour one morning, we resurrected an old kerosene heater to keep milk flowing for the last few milkings of 2022.

The cows love this cold dry weather above everything else

Ground conditions have improved significantly with the frosty nights so we’ve managed to graze off the last few heavy covers very well without any damage. The milking cows are very happy again out in the paddocks at night which is helping to reduce workload a bit in the sheds.

The cows love this cold dry weather above everything else and hopefully we can keep them out until dry-off at the end of this week. Drying off is obviously a lot cleaner and healthier when done outside in this type of weather so we took the opportunity to dry off a couple of batches this week and we aim to dry off the last of them before it changes too much.

We had considered milking a few cows through the winter, but we went once-a-day milking a bit sooner than we had planned and between that and the wet weather, cows have gone back a bit too much in yield to bother milking through.

We’ll take it a bit easier over the Christmas instead and shut down the milking parlour for a couple of weeks. We have a few bits of dosing and vaccinations to get done through the dry period, so having all the cows dry at the same time will simplify things.

Cull cow prices

Cull cow prices are holding up very well in both the mart and the factory so we might bring in a few to the mart this week and hold whatever we have space for on slats until they are finished for the factory in a few weeks. We have them on 6kg of a finishing ration to try to get them tidied up as soon as possible.

It’s tempting to offload all of them into the mart this week and get another job out of the way before calving, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to pull out a few batches through the spring. The price might rise even further through January so we will hold a few for the moment and see how things go.

We should have good enough demand for calves through the spring again next year despite the price of inputs. We are expecting a lot of beef calves through February and March after the initial influx of Friesian calves in January. We have a mix of breeds due to arrive through the spring after using a selection of Gene Ireland beef sires.

We are looking to simplify things, with only Aberdeen Angus bulls used to breed beef calves from now on. We will use Angus through both AI and stock bulls so we will spend a while looking for suitable bulls over the dry period.

Hopefully we can pick a couple of good bulls with excellent conformation from AI catalogues and pick a few similar on farm to do a good job for us. Easy calving is important but a quality calf is just as desirable.

Trying to find the most suitable ones will keep us busy for a few days through the holidays.