The days are filled with slurry, lime and silage at the moment, with the past grazing season almost a distant memory now and spring grass just a dim light at the end of the tunnel.

The dry, cold weather is helping to dry up the fields and roadways after the wet month of November but more of the same is needed after the challenging conditions through the last grazing rotation.

Hopefully we’ll arrive in the spring with good enough conditions to get cows out to grass early.

We have a pit of maize silage in reserve but, obviously, it’s easier to milk cows off grass and healthier to get them out to grass as much as possible after calving.

We’ll see what Mother Nature throws at us and deal with it as it comes.

We are using a lot of silage bales early this winter from the bumper growing season just past.

We bought a new shear grab to deal with them as we had over 1,000 bales to handle, so this is taking a good bit of the work out of it and making life bearable when feeding 30 or 40 bales some days. More silage pits are on the shopping list for down the road but all in its own time.

The grab is working very well on pit silage, maize silage and bales so it won’t be wasted if we get the pits extended sooner rather than later. It is also a big help when feeding hay or straw through our tub feeder to give the bales a chop before throwing them in.

We are mixing in some hay from 2018 for the better-conditioned dry cows in the early part of the dry period.

We will switch to straw when we get closer to calving but for the moment it suits us to use up this hay and the bales of silage made later in the grazing season. We will switch to pit silage at calving and hopefully leave some better-quality bales from early last year in reserve for any deficit in March/April.

We have some clipping, dosing and footbathing to do over the next few weeks to tidy up cows and heifers in preparation for calving.

We have to freeze brand the heifers as well and vaccinate for scour before the end of the month.

Milking once-a-day for the last month is helping to free up time and energy for these jobs so we should get them all done in good time.

Calving

We have a good plan in place for calving with a good team of staff for the busy period.

We have a volunteer for night duty again and we should have enough sheds to house all of the calves, if necessary. We have a good number of sales booked in already so hopefully we see decent demand for the calves again this year.

There is a lot of media coverage recently about problems with calf welfare growing as the national herd grows.

The reality is that calf mortality has improved over the last few years as the national herd has grown, post-quotas, which disproves that theory.

While the overall situation is improving nationally, there’s a lot of hearsay out there and claims by some media organisations that they have negative footage captured regarding calf welfare.

We live in strange times where sensationalising these problems is more valuable to media outlets than addressing the problems directly and getting them sorted out.

None of us want a few bad apples tarnishing the reputation of the whole industry, so we need to be as proactive as possible in dealing with this situation. It will be too late in another month to make any changes, with another calving season just around the corner.