Grass growth here has been holding steady at around 60kg DM/ha over the past few weeks, which, while not disastrous, hasn’t given us the opportunity to build the kind of grass cover we’d normally be targeting for this time of year.

At the moment, our average farm cover is sitting at about 850kg DM/ha. It’s manageable, but well off target heading into October.

I had the option to keep pushing hard with silage and really pull back demand to around 30kg DM/ha, but truth be told, we were getting fairly fed up of having to feed out silage every grazing. It’s a time-consuming job, and not one I wanted to continue unless absolutely necessary. There’s also a school of thought that questions the wisdom of trying to build very high covers in the autumn – if the weather turns wet, those heavy covers can be very difficult to graze out cleanly, and regrowths tend to be a lot slower from the heavier swards. So, for this year at least, we’re taking a slightly different tack and seeing how it plays out.

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We’ve just kicked off our autumn rotation planner this week, so it’s back on the silage again to help bridge the grass deficit. We’ve allocated an area of 0.75ha per day, with the aim of keeping cows out until mid-November. Given that our current pre-grazing covers are around 1,500kg DM/ha, we’re going to need to feed about four bales of silage per day along with 4kg of concentrates per cow to make up the shortfall. Hopefully, we’ll get a bounce in growth soon and be able to ease off the silage again, but if it doesn’t come, we’ll keep the feed going into the cows to maintain performance. We’ve good silage reserves in the yard, but at a rate of four bales a day, we won’t be long going through it.

Milk yield is still strong at around 19.5 litres per cow per day. Protein has jumped nicely to 4.39%, and butterfat is holding up well too at 5.15%, so they’re performing fairly well considering the grass situation.

We got the two silage blocks cut again last week in excellent conditions, and the quality of the bales looks top class. While we had the weather on our side, we also emptied the tank from the collecting yard and spread it on the reseeded block, and we got another three-quarter-full tank spread on the other silage block.

That bit of slurry should drive growth on nicely – we’re hoping to either graze it with the heifers or maybe zero-graze for the cows in a month or two if ground conditions allow. I’ve also a bit of potash to go out – one bag of muriate of potash per acre – for those silage fields and about half of the paddocks at home that are showing up as index two for K. That’ll be done in the next week or two, weather permitting.

The heifers are flying it on the out-block and are doing a great job grazing out, even though covers are very heavy now. They will get another week or two off the heavy cover and then it will be back to what they grazed in mid August, which has nearly 1,500kg DM/ha on it now. The plan is to keep them out until December if we can — I will have enough grass ahead of them to make that work, provided ground conditions don’t go against us.

Up until this week, we hadn’t had a lame cow in nearly two months — then, we had six cases crop up. A few ulcers and some drops, most likely from the roadways getting mucky again after the recent showers. That said, the rubber mats I installed at the exit of the milking parlour, on the ramp coming into the collecting yard, and at the exit race seem to have made a difference overall.