The last few months have been very tough on the farm. We have effectively been grazing in marginal conditions for over five months and even this dry farm is suffering a lot after the last week. The last rotation of 2015 was fine at the start but ground was getting damaged a bit at the end of the round.

This ground was hit hard again with cows and rain in February and, at the moment, it’s understandably too soft to travel on a third time.

We have enough silage in the pit, so we decided to stand the cows off on cubicles for a few days to try to let ground recover a bit. Hopefully this week will see some light at the end of the tunnel with a good, dry week forecast and temperatures rising into double figures most days, without any frost at night. Even two or three dry days would see a big improvement in conditions at this time of year. We live in hope.

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The weather and lack of growth has cost us a lot of money this spring with feed costs up by over €1 per head per day for the last fortnight and a loss of production of around the same figure. We fed off the last of the maize silage last week, so the diet now consists of grass silage and 5kg of concentrates.

The last collection with grass in the diet had a protein figure of 3.33% but the next one could be anything.

The situation is the same across the Glanbia region with milk this week 3.22% protein versus 3.33% this week last year. Meal trucks are extremely busy again and with the milk price on the floor, it’s a very stressful time for dairy farmers.

We will push the breeding back a few days this year to 20 April as the herd is becoming more fertile every year, so the demand for early grass will be high enough with this calving date. It might also lessen the effects of the diet changes this year.

Building numbers

At this stage, there are only six cows left to calve on the farm. We left the bulls in a bit longer than is ideal as we were building numbers this year, but next year they will be finished calving a few weeks before breeding to give everyone a bit of space before heat detection starts.

We will finish organising our AI straws this week for the breeding season and hopefully they will breed as good a bunch of calves as last year.

We have weaned all of the heifer calves over 100kg and these will go to grass as soon as weather allows.

The plan with these calves is to do them as well as possible inside and then to bolus, vaccinate and give them a long-acting dose as they go to grass. Some of these calves have 1kg/day of liveweight gain from birth to weaning. Hopefully, we can give them good-quality grass and keep them moving forward well at grass.

Weather

The weather is also continuing to hold up progress and add cost to our farm development. We have fencing and roadways to finish off, but we managed to get our milk tank delivered and the poles are up for the electricity connection this week. It’s all adding to a busy spring but, hopefully, we can get it all sorted over the next few months.