The main focus on the farm at the minute is trying to keep grass in front of cows. Although it has been a wonderful spring so far, up until recently temperatures in this part of the world have remained low and grass growth has remained slow.

As I have over half the farm closed for first cut silage, I have a high grass demand of 60kgs/dm/ha on the grazing block and am now under pressure! I’m hopeful that the spike in growth that we usually get up here in mid-late May will come soon and get me out of trouble.

I find keeping myself under pressure focuses the mind

That or I’ll have to graze a paddock or two of my silage, which wouldn’t really be the end of the world. I like to aim high when I’m closing up silage, if I can manage to keep it all closed, all well and good and if I must graze a bit at a later stage, no harm done. I find keeping myself under pressure focuses the mind.

If I have too much grass, with the best will in the world, I find sometimes it can get wasted. Ground conditions are great at the moment and utilisation is excellent, so being slightly short of grass at the minute is not that bad of a place to be.

Plate meter

Any die-hard grass measurers among you will be shocked to hear that I only managed to get the plate meter out last week! When I entered my figures into Pasturebase, my farm cover came up at 542kg/dm/ha. At first glance, I thought this figure to be extremely low and it prompted me to think that I need to bring back in a few paddocks from my silage ground.

But when I scrolled back and looked at my cover on 10 May 2018, I was down at 462kg/dm/ha and I managed to keep the show on the road. It really brought home to me the value of measuring and collecting information. An invaluable management tool is being able to compare one year to the next.

I’ve decided to sit tight and see what the next week brings. Hopefully one big first cut will save me from taking the silage pit cover off for a second time and I will bale a smaller second cut.

Beef summit

I attended the highly charged Beef Summit in Ballinasloe on 9 May. Speakers included Minister of Agriculture Michael Creed, Department of Agriculture secretary general Brendan Gleeson, Prof Gerry Boyle of Teagasc, Cormac Healy of Meat Industry Ireland, Andrew Cromie of ICBF and Tara McCarthy of Bord Bia, to name but a few.

If nothing else was achieved by the event, it really let these industry stakeholders see and indeed feel the pure and absolute anger, frustration and fear being experienced by Irish beef farmers. Justin McCarthy said in his editorial in last week’s Irish Farmers Journal that the beef summit will be a failure if it doesn’t lead to change. I really hope it does lead to change, but except in the form of extra government support, it’s hard to see where this change is going to come from.

What we really need is to try to reduce the number of cattle

We all would prefer to be able to earn a profit from the marketplace, but that just doesn’t seem to be possible. The €200 per suckler payment is still peddled about and although I’m a suckler farmer, I don’t think support in that format is a good idea.

It would surely incentivise farmers to keep more cows, when what we really need is to try to reduce the number of cattle in the country to try to let the laws of supply and demand increase their value.

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