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At long last we in the south midlands or southwest are having some consistent rain. Combined with the warm weather, the grass is starting to grow.
Cows are having a fresh paddock every day as we try to achieve some winter cover, and at night they have the silage face, four big bales of hay and the choice of the cubicles or a sacrifice paddock.
The rain in the last few days has driven them into the cubicles at night.
Our slurry and dirty water system consists of two parts. The slurry from the cubicles and yards is scraped into the slurry pit and the drainings from that and the run-off from the yards go into the dirty water pit.
They are both the same size, but the dirty water pit’s capacity over the last 25 years has been halved by the depth of sediment accumulated in the bottom.
So this year we tankered and injected the dirty water and got in a long-reach excavator to excavate and then spread the four feet of sediment.
The liquid we injected for the first time ever surprised and pleased us with the grass growth and I am tempted, in spite of the compaction, to use this method rather than our current rota rainer, which I am assured contributes to N evaporation.
Autumn calving
The autumn-calving cows have been difficult. So far, out of 20 cows calved, we’d had one successful caesarean, a pair of dead twins from a cow that calved early, two calves backwards born dead and we also lost one cow from a series of complications.
Last week, I attended the Southwest Dairy Event which was very well attended. As we left Wiltshire and drove into Somerset, we were amazed at the amount of grass there was compared to Wiltshire – some even taking bulky cuts of third-cut silage. How I wish!
Just round the corner from the Southwest Dairy Event is the new Kingsway Dairy Development Centre which we had heard about when we attended the World Dairy Summit in Belfast.
It was good to see it in action – a £1.3m project for 180 cows (Irish-bred), a lightweight fabric roof (less steel work needed), two robotic milking units, cows currently housed, fed by robot 15 times a day and scraped by a robot.
It looks very impressive, but I look forward to seeing their experiences at grazing come April.
Hoping to meet some of you at Millstreet this weekend.
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