Grass has finally started to catch up with the cows this week in Clara and we have been able to take the silage out of the diet and park up the diet feeder at long last.

It’s been three months of heavy summer feeding after a very long winter and it almost feels like this is the first chance to come up for a bit of air and decide what to do with the day’s work rather than having it dictated to us by the weather.

Winter feed stocks are still the big issue facing us on the farm as we face into the winter. We will make a few more acres of silage next week before building grass for the autumn and then we will see where we stand and how empty the silage pits are. The maize will be ready towards the end of the month but most of this will be held for feeding in the spring when cows calve in fresh.

We also have some Italian ryegrass booked in for harvest at the end of October but it’s difficult to work out at this stage how much it will yield. We will keep this monitored over the next few weeks but it’s very difficult to do a proper feed budget until all those chickens come home to roost and all harvesting is finished for the year.

We have a good handle on the demand side and the number of stock being held on to for the winter and we have been tidying up this number as much as possible over the past few weeks. A few bulls and cull cows went to the factory this week, but we still have a few heifers that didn’t hold to the bull hanging around the yard. We are feeding them heavily with beet pulp at grass for the next few weeks before a trip to the factory.

We will work out how much of a shortfall we have when the maize comes in at the end of this month. We will then try to fill that gap with the Italian ryegrass and if that comes up short we will plug the gap with beet pulp or soya hulls or whatever is available.

We also need to take a hard look at how many cows we are going to milk next year and make a few choices on that front. We have 40 more heifers than we need so we can either milk the extra 40 cows, cull 40 extra cows or sell 40 heifers.

With the extremes we’ve seen over the past 12 months, we probably won’t grow numbers next year or carry the extra numbers through the winter, so it’s a choice between culling more cows or selling some of the heifers.

The heifer market looks weak enough at the moment and while the cull cow price of around €3/kg is weak enough too, it might be the lesser of two evils to sell the late calvers and to tidy up the bottom end of the herd on conformation and production again.

The heifers are mostly in-calf early too and they are an exceptional bunch after all of their summer feeding so that will probably swing us in the direction of holding onto them.

Yield in litres has fallen back a bit with the cows this week after the diet feeder and the beet pulp supply was turned off.

We have dropped from a steady 25l to 22l in the space of a few collections. We are still doing 1.85kg of solids with protein jumping up to 4.10% when silage was removed. Hopefully, they will steady up now at that level of production and milk on well for the rest of the season.