We are now in the last week of September and the attention is turning to closing up the farm.

The main objective when closing up is to leave grass for the coming spring and ensuring that it is of good quality.

The level of grass you want on your farm in the spring is dictated by stocking rate, turnout date and early demand, which is directly related to how compact your calving is for dairy farmers.

An opening cover calculation should always be made around 1 February and your AFC should range from 750kg if you’re at the lower end of the scale up to 1,100kg for the higher end.

This is a good place to start. Once you know your required opening cover, you can work back to your target closing cover on 1 December.

If you have calculated opening and closing cover before you will have an idea what your farm grows over the winter. If not, I suggest you estimate it on average farms grow around 300kg/ha in this period. However, this varies a lot around the country.

So taking that your target opening cover is 1,000kg/ha and you grow 300kg/ha over the winter, you want a closing cover of 700kg/ha on 1 December.

The best way to achieve this is by getting a high percentage of ground grazed and closed in October.

The exact closing start date will vary depending on how growth and weather conditions come but in general you should close your first paddock around 5 October.

From here, you need to target getting close to 70% of the farm closed by 1 November. Set up an autumn rotational planner now to help you monitor this.