Over the last week, there was plenty of activity in the fields on the Greenfield farm in Kilkenny.

I’m sure some people saw the tractor and spinner going up and down the paddocks and thought that a late bag of nitrogen was going out. No, it was 15 units of potash per acre on those paddocks that are short in potassium (K).

Also slurry was spread with the umbilical, so that tanks are more or less empty now as the closed period for spreading kicks in.

In the last week, only 7mm of rain were recorded – on top of the 17mm for the previous week. Farm grass cover dropped down, as expected, to 1,075kg DM/ha from 1,200kg DM/ha. The plan is that the herd would graze 20ha per week and in the last week it grazed 17ha. Grass cover per cow is down 378kg DM/cow. Since the 1 October, about 22.5% is closed for next spring. A lot of these paddocks have got slurry over the last seven days.

Up until the end of September the farm has grown 14.4t grass DM/ha (one tonne more ahead of the same period in 2016).

A final milk recording is planned for the coming week. From the bulk tank reading, the cows are milking about 12 litres and the last milk test was 5.38% fat, 4.43% protein, 4.65% lactose and 187,000 cells/ml on SCC.

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