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There’s no getting away from the rain this spring, with any step forward in ground conditions quickly followed by two steps back. We are managing to keep cows out grazing most of the time but there’s a fair amount of clay visible around gaps and water troughs when cows are finished grazing each paddock.
Hopefully things improve before the second rotation, so we don’t compound any damage by cutting into ground again. Most of the damage done so far is just superficial and at worst will need a few grass seeds thrown out and a roll when conditions improve. Hopefully we can hold it at that level of damage for the next week or two.
Cows are surprisingly resilient though and despite all the disruption, they are milking very well at 2.1kg of milk solids from 4kg of meal, showing plenty of strong heats and cell count is satisfactory at around 100. All we need now is a few fine days to take the pressure off man and beast.
The yearling heifers are all out on grass too, with the last batch let out of the shed this week. It’s as long a winter as we’ve had with these animals but hopefully it’s over now and we can get them settled on a grazing routine in plenty of time for the breeding season. We will hopefully try a synchronisation programme including some sexed semen with these animals this year.
We will also try to get some urea out this week and keep grass moving forward into the second rotation. The advice is to leave protected urea for the next round of fertiliser so we will. We will apply standard urea at a bag to the acre this round and probably look at sulphur for the next round as well.
We are down to the last 65 cows to calve and it will be all beef calves from here on. We have a few more calves sold from the yard and a few booked to go over the next week so the last few will be easy enough to tidy up. All the calves that we are keeping are well settled in on the computerised feeder system, so hopefully the back is broken on that section of the spring workload. We are continuing to feed a lot of silage to the milkers this week with a mix of grass and maize silage going in. We should have plenty of feed on hand to get us through to magic day, whenever it arrives, so we dropped meal feeding to 4kg this week. We will drop out grass silage whenever grazing conditions improve.
Coronavirus
Coronavirus is the big worry off farm and how it will affect us all as we move through the stages of the outbreak over the coming months. Self-isolation is nothing new to farmers, especially in the springtime, but kids still go to school and shopping, religious ceremonies, meetings and sporting events still draw us into public areas.
The kids are almost the perfect vector for disease spread. They mix in crowded classrooms five days a week and spend the evenings and weekends mixing with a larger circle of friends at sports, extra-curricular activities and parties. If schools close, we will need to look at all of these areas, which obviously isn’t good news for anyone in that sector of the economy.
Food will still be consumed over the next few months so hopefully the effects won’t be felt as much in the agri-sector. People’s eating habits will change, however; we are already seeing the hotel and restaurant trade falling back. Tourism will be restricted as well so it will be interesting to see how this affects our markets. The other big worry in dairying is around milk collection and processing if the workforce involved is seriously affected.
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