The rain has arrived in Kilkenny at last, with 25mm recorded on the farm last Sunday morning and 35mm in total over the last week.

Grass is starting to come alive again but we will have to keep feeding silage and beet pulp nuts until the weekend at least to try to let covers build up again ahead of the herd.

We are still feeding 5kg of concentrates per day and 6kg of beet pulp nuts along with a few kg of silage to carry the pulp nuts through the diet feeder.

We have gone back to feeding the cows out in the paddock this week with the feed put out in a long thin line along the fences at the side of the paddocks.

It was just getting too monotonous scraping yards every day inside and with all the dry weather it was also getting risky keeping cows in around slippery yards for hours every day.

Herd health has been good through the drought, but there’s no point in putting extra stress on cows. Some feed might be wasted outside but it’s minimal as the ground looks clean enough after each feed.

Cows are continuing to milk very well on their extra feed. They are producing 24l of milk at 4.13% fat and 3.79% protein or 1.95kg of solids. This is from a herd of cows that calved early and compactly and went back in-calf early. This makes a mockery of our predicted milk figures from ICBF, with our milk sitting at exactly -200kg and our solids at -8.1kg.

We are regularly advised from these figures that our cows will not respond to extra concentrate feeding so there’s very little point in giving it to them.

Trying to create a single index to encompass all dairy breeds and to represent them accurately is a huge challenge for the organisation and has been from the start. The ICBF is 20 years old this year and has achieved a lot over the last 20 years, most notably in terms of how data is gathered, processed and reported back to farmers. It has also alienated some breeders on both the beef and dairy side of the house.

The organisation is working with dairy, beef and sheep at this stage which is a serious amount of data to take on and especially with all the developments in genomics coming on stream.

New traits are added to all indexes annually, with even more calculations to be thrown into the mix. Some of the new information on the health traits is very interesting. It’s just difficult to see how it will all have a meaningful influence on the final all-encompassing figure of EBI for an individual bull, cow or herd.

Hopefully with all the forward thinking and all the new developments which can be very exciting, someone remembers to look back over their shoulder and keep an eye on the boring old stuff like accurately predicting how much a calf is capable of producing when it becomes a cow and how long it will last in the herd.

Iverk Show

We had a great day out at the Iverk Show in Piltown, Co Kilkenny, last weekend. We try to get the better Friesian cows out to a local show at least once a year and Iverk have been very good to put on great classes for British Friesian cows for the last few years.

We were lucky enough to pick up a couple of prizes but the day was mostly about getting out and meeting people and seeing something different. It was a great show as usual with a big crowd in attendance.

Thanks and well done to all of the volunteers and sponsors that make all the local shows a success around the country and to team Iverk in particular.