Most herds are now three weeks into the calving season. At this stage, close to 50% of cows should be calved and, on many farms, the first of the bull calves will be sold this week.

Often, problems only start to develop now – many farmers report a good start to calving but a bad end, with more disease and losses in late February and March compared with late January and February.

The reason for this is the disease burden increases from now on. Sheds are near full, air temperatures have increased and there’s three weeks’ worth of faeces and afterbirth having built up in calf and calving sheds.

Now is a good time to clean out calf and calving sheds and build up again with fresh clean straw. While straw is scarce and costly this year, a disease outbreak will cost you more time and money, so don’t skimp on it.

Ideally, the sheds should be washed and disinfected, but this takes time so is probably not practical in most situations.

Try to limit the amount of moving of calves between sheds – this all increases the risk of disease. The healthiest farms will keep calves in one pen from a few days old to turnout. This may mean keeping bulls and heifers separate.

The first-born calves will now be approaching three weeks of age, so should be considered for once a day feeding shortly. You need to feed these calves a good ration and have plenty of access to hay/straw and water. Is there a suitable yard or field to turn out young calves with natural or low-cost shelters?

With a reasonably dry weather forecast, there should be an opportunity for most farmers to get some field work done this week. Is it dry enough to start grazing? Get fertiliser out? Get slurry out? Get all the fencing done?

All of these jobs, while important, take time and it’s hard to get away from the yard when there are cows calving. On busy farms, as much jobs as possible should be outsourced at this time of year. Slurry and fertiliser spreading are two obvious ones.

If spreading the first round of urea now, on highly stocked farms I would be inclined to go with 46 units/acre on land that has not received slurry or fertiliser yet this year.

Grass growth: Ruttle ramps it up in Rathkeale

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