The wet weather this week will keep the cows confined to the barracks a bit more than we’ve been used to over the last few weeks. We have another seven days of grass to graze before closing up for the winter, but it might take us 10 days to get through it if we have to miss a few days with rain here and there.

We still have over 60% of the herd milking – they are producing 12.5l at 5.87% fat and 4.60% protein and cell count is still steady at 149,000 with once a day, so we will keep a good share of them tipping along into next week.

Body condition score is holding up very well, but we will have to dry off more this weekend based on calving dates and to keep the lactose levels up.

The calves have settled well into their winter routine this week and intakes are going up steadily. They are in an outside yard, so their feed is mixed at home and brought to their yard every second day.

We need to watch how much they eat closely to keep feed in front of them. They got their first dose last week and look to be in very good order after their first grazing season such as it was.

The in-calf heifers will come in early next week as well after a nice extension to their grazing season. They are being moved twice a day for the last few weeks in the wet weather to mind ground.

We will try to give them a crash course in cubicle training and run them through the milking parlour a few times, if possible, once they come in so hopefully they can hit the ground running after calving.

With the shortened winter period this year, everything gets condensed and they will be calving before they get properly settled into the herd. It’s not a complaint obviously, just an observation and we will have to plan the dosing and vaccination regime around this and make adjustments accordingly.

Our pedigree Friesian bulls, on the other hand, are settled into the shed for the last few weeks and they will be pushed on well with concentrates over the winter.

We bedded them on peat for a change this year to spare straw for feeding.

It seems to be working very well so far with the bulls staying very clean and looking very comfortable when lying down.

The gap between the EBI index of these bulls and the herd performance here is widening all of the time and it’s getting very difficult to see much correlation between the two with the British Friesian breed in Ireland at this stage.

Solution

A separate index for the Friesians is being suggested as a solution in some quarters but a separate active bull list for pure Friesian bulls might suffice to rank available Friesian bulls against each other and make it easier for farmers who want to include some Friesian bulls in their breeding programme to pick out the best ones available.

With all of the negative press about calf quality and calf welfare coming out of the dairy herd in recent times, it has to be better to make information as accessible as possible for anyone interested in using a breed that will help somewhat to alleviate this problem. As the dairy herd increases, the number of calves increases and the problems will keep increasing too if we keep ignoring them.