Grass growth has well and truly kicked off across most of the country over the past week. It’s now time to manage getting cattle out to grass. Many farms have been buying fodder for the past weeks, or even months. The temptation is there to open the shed doors and spread stock across the whole farm now that ground conditions allow. In reality its best to have a more structured approach to turnout.

Fertiliser

First things first, let’s maximise the amount of grass that we are growing on farm. Has ground had an initial application of fertiliser? If not it needs to go out this weekend. The soil temperatures are well and truly up and you will get an instant response to fertiliser application. The forecast for the coming week to 10 days suggests the weather will remain predominantly mild. Blanket-spreading 35-40kg nitrogen/ha will kick-start growth across the farm and allow you to get animals to good grass sooner.

Where ground conditions are favourable, I would be targeting getting priority stock out to grass first – ie freshly calved cows and calves. Again, now that ground conditions are improving, I would avoid having a small number of stock on every field on the farm. We need to give grass the chance to get going. This is often the case where there is a sheep enterprise on-farm, they are spread around all the fields post-lambing and where grass covers are low it won’t take many mouths to keep on top of regrowth. Try to tighten ewes and lambs up as much as possible in the coming days to give the grass a chance.

Even if this means having to supplement ewes and lambs for a week or so, it could mean getting cattle out to grass that bit sooner and will be well worth the extra bit of concentrate feeding.

Where there are no sheep on-farm and ground has been rested over the winter months, you need to be brave and get a decent number of stock out to grass. With the sudden increase in temperatures we are going to see a burst of grass growth over the coming days. There’s no point waiting until grass has gotten ahead of cattle to turn out. All of a sudden you will have grass everywhere and struggle to keep on top of it.

Where rotational or paddock grazing is being practised, this will allow you to take out any strong paddocks in the form of baled silage during periods of high growth. However, if you are set-stocked, this grass will end up heading out, reducing the feed quality in front of stock and ultimately having a negative impact on daily liveweight gains.

With the amount of fodder used this winter, this is something we cannot afford to let happen. We need to make the best use of every blade of grass grown on-farm this year. Physically measuring grass is the only way to accurately budget it. Be this plate meter, cut and weigh system, sward stick or at the very least simply walking the farm once a week.

Monitoring how much grass you have on-farm ahead of stock will help make decisions before there are any problems.

Stretching supplies

Where you can’t get all cattle out and need to continue to stretch the remaining supply of fodder for another few weeks, what are the options available?

Selling stock is always an option, store cattle are a good trade at the moment, especially cattle around the 440-470kg mark. It can be expected that grass buyers will become more active in the next week or two as supplies increase. This should help boost the lighter-type cattle that are destined for a season at pasture. Where you are purchasing silage and concentrate for these animals, you need to consider if it is worthwhile holding onto them for another couple of weeks or selling now.

Post-calving

Where spring calved cows are still being fed and you are looking to stretch fodder with concentrates, to accurately do so you need to know the dry matter and digestibility of the silage you are feeding. It should be noted that the energy demand of a suckler female increases by 50% the minute she calves. What we must absolutely not do is try and maintain her on the same diet as before.

Table 1 outlines how much silage you can take out of the diet for each kg of meals you offer. Note that at least 50% of the diet should be maintained as forage. For a 700kg suckler cow eating silage at 30% dry matter, she should have daily access to a minimum 23.5kg (fresh weight) silage.

Condition

While some body condtion loss post-calving is normal and in many cases unavoidable, we need to minimise it as much as possible. Aim to lose less than half a body condition score between calving and conception. This equates to around 35kg of live weight.

The period between calving and conception (post-partum interval) is the most important period in a suckler’s production cycle. We need to keep it as short as possible and the key to this is driving energy intake. If we don’t provide enough energy in the diet she will utilise her own fat reserves.

When an animal uses up lots of her own reserves, her reproductive system will become sluggish, lengthening her post-partum interval and ultimately increasing the calving interval of the herd.

Once calves are over three weeks old they can be separated from the cows into a creep area and only allowed access to suck twice a day – morning and evening. What this does is reduce the overall demand on the cow and can help reduce silage requirements.

There are also savings to be made on bedding – with calves well bedded in a separate area, cows can be bedded a little harder on their own.

Another benefit of this method is that it breaks the maternal cow/calf bond that can inhibit the onset of oestrus. By breaking the bond it will encourage the cows to start cycling once again, reducing the interval between calving and service.

This may seem like a lot of extra work, but calves quickly become trained to this system in a couple of days. They can be encouraged back to the creep area by feeding some concentrates.