Calving has been progressing very well for the last three weeks. We had half of the herd calved in 15 days and two-thirds calved at the end of the first three weeks. We have lost a small number of calves at calving as usual but having someone on supervising the night calving has kept this to a minimum. So far, cow and calf health has been excellent and cows have cleaned well after calving and gone into full production very quickly.

We are trying to keep the cows out grazing as much as possible. We are offering some maize silage every day and 5kg of concentrate at milking time. The main milking herd is outside grazing day and night most days, with the freshly calved batch left in every night. The main aim for us at this time of year is to keep the cows fully fed and protect ground rather than worrying too much about grazing residuals. They are grazing out paddocks very well on the dry days but leaving a bit behind for the next rotation on the wetter days.

With 200 cows calved already, it’s very important to move on some bull calves as quickly as possible. Forty calves were delivered this week to a neighbour to rear for beef and another 20 will go out around the weekend to another beef farmer. We already have 70 heifer calves trained on to the computerised feeder which also helps to take some pressure off and keep the labour of dragging fresh milk around the yard to a minimum.

The young calves are batched into groups of 10 and 20 as soon as possible after birth. We feed as much colostrum and transition milk as they can drink for the first few days and then keep it to 3l to 4l/feed after that. All milk is acidified before feeding and this seems to reduce the incidence of any digestive problems. The calves for sale generally move in one direction, with the keepers moving towards the automatic feeder if heifers or the bull shed. When 15 or 16 calves arrive in 24 hours, the system comes under a bit of pressure and they get juggled a bit, but we find space somewhere.

The heifer calves on the computer feeder are getting 900g of Heiferlac per day in 6l of milk. This worked very well for us last year, with calves averaging almost 1kg of liveweight gain per day while on the feeder. The bull calves will be pushed up to 4l of acidified whole milk twice per day when two weeks old and hopefully they will at least match the heifers’ growth rates with this level of feeding.

The main jobs for the next few weeks are to keep cows and calves as healthy as possible, to keep cows out as much as we can and to hopefully get the maiden heifers out of the shed by the end of the month.

The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur with an average of almost 10 cows calving per day, 10 fresh calves to get started daily and three or four heifers to introduce to their milking career.

The bonus is that most of the heavy work for the year is already done now and after another three weeks of calving we will be down to very small numbers. We are starting to get bigger volumes of milk away to the co-op already and, with milk price on the rise, hopefully it will all be worth it over the next few months.