Farmer Writes: keeping a close eye on grass

The grass situation has improved well here in the last week with growth rate holding at 50kg DM/ha. I went up to 5kg of nuts for two weeks, but then the cows started to clean out the sections as well as before.

So, I dropped back to 3kg, but they still were leaving grass behind. We are now back to one bale of silage per milking and graze outs are spot on.

Their yield has dropped back to 16 litres, but they had actually gone back to 18 litres anyway, so with the 2kg less of nuts and two fewer bales per day, we are better off as it is costing us less. Average farm cover has increased to 907kg DM/ha, demand is now at 40kg DM/ha.

I can’t see growth staying ahead of this for much longer so I will be keeping a close eye on the cover and will probably be back in with the extra bale soon, but it’s nice to get a reprieve for a few weeks. We have 47% of our area grazed in the final rotation now and are bang on target.

The heifers will be home to the shed this week as they will be out of grass, but they have a great job done on the silage ground, with it skinned and no damage done.

Different

It is a bit different than last year when we had to bring them home because it was flooded. This ground won’t be grazed again before silage next year as we don’t have any young stock here. It’s great to have it cleaned off well now, a bit earlier than I would like, but hopefully we will get a good early first cut next year.

We have had a few lame cows in the last few weeks with drops and one cow with mastitis, she had cleaned up well but got it back again the morning after the first frost. We treated her again and she is fine now. The latest butterfat was 5.27% with protein at 4.16% and SCC at 73,000.

Dad got his winter barley sowed last weekend in great conditions, so he is happy with that. The ground was still very dry underneath when ploughed up. Tractor sales have also picked up a lot in the last few weeks, with five tractors sold in the last six weeks and more enquiries coming in.

We are putting up a new machinery/storage shed over the winter, and have spent a few days over the last few weeks getting the site ready, as we need to build up the area a few feet.

We had a discussion group meeting last week and we received some information about the Farming for Water EIP, which I think is a great scheme.

Funding

There should be no reason for farmers not to avail of some funding from this scheme, to ensure we do our best to help improve water quality. Our local EIP adviser is coming out to our farm on Monday to see what we need to do.

I have a few TAMS III applications submitted for claim and payment under the solar scheme, farm safety and Women Farmer Capital Investment Scheme. None of them have made any progress since I submitted them, months ago. This is very frustrating as we have paid out the money and had all paperwork submitted to the Department as soon as possible after the payment was made.

TAMS is a great help to improving and upgrading facilities on farm, but these delays are unacceptable for claims to go untouched for months.

When any correspondence regarding the claims does come from the Department, we only have “10 working days” to respond or the application can be cancelled. It seems to be one rule for them and another for us.