As would be expected with this time of the year, grass growth has really begun to tail off around the country. “Grass growth is really starting to tail off as the days get shorter but it’s what you would expect for this time of the year,” according to Joey Malone, farm manager at a grass-based dairy farm at Nethergarrel Farm in Lockerbie.

Growth has been strong over the past few weeks on the farm with growth ranging from 50kg DM/ha for last week to 37kg DM/ha for the week before that.

“In early September growth was up at 75kg DM/ha which helped to build farm cover,” according to Joey.

“Ground is still dry for the time of year which is helping grazing conditions and will hopefully extend grazing into the autumn.”

Drop off

According to the latest figures from AHDB, growth has dropped by nearly 10kg DM/ha over the past week to 35.8kg DM/ha on recording farms throughout the UK. This is in contrast to the growth rates for the end of September 2017 when growth was at 54.3kg DM/ha. However, there is a large contrast around the UK with growth ranging from 11kg to 66kg DM/ha.

“September growth has been normal around here but it hasn’t made up for how poor it was during the summer,” according to Michael Blanche consultant and beef and sheep farmer from just south of Perth. “Growth on the top farm that is 800-900ft above sea level has probably been around 25kg DM/ha over September while the lower farm would probably have been around 35kg DM/ha.

“It did recover well given the year that there has been. Ground is still very dry and utilisation will be good if the weather holds,” Michael explained. “I would measure grass across the farm every fortnight and the farm has an average cover now of 1,700kg DM/ha. This was up over 1,800kg DM/ha in early September so we are eating into our covers. We just keep sheep for the winter and probably have about 60% of the silage that we would usually have but we planted a forage crop this year that had a mixture of redstart, kale and swedes to help to fill the gap.”

Michael continued: “This is our first year using it but it is looking good, so the plan will be to strip graze this to stretch it out.”

Variable

Grass growth across the north east of the country is very variable according to Declan Marren, advisor with the Farm Profit Programme: “Where farms have managed to get sufficient moisture, grass is in good supply with enough on farms to see stock held out until the end of the month at least. It also allowed some farms to make up the winter fodder deficit with later cuts of silage.

“Since the beginning of September there has been just 22mm of rainfall on one farm near Inverurie. However, this is much more than some other areas that simply haven’t had sufficient rainfall to rectify the soil moisture deficits from the dry summer.

“The only upside of this is that ground conditions are excellent and if stock need to be fed outside, it isn’t causing much damage to fields,” Declan concluded.