Grass growth has picked up this week, with the rain at the weekend followed by a rise in temperatures. As we come into the main grass-growing season, important decisions will have to be made to maintain grass quality.

Most farms will hit magic day over the next week or two. Magic day is where grass growth surpasses demand.

This will mean your farm is in a position to build grass again. However, the plan should be to manage quality rather than build.

Teagasc predicted grass growth rates for the week 6 to 12 April 2020.

The best way to do this is to measure your grass and look at the figures. The main figure we want to look at, along with growth and demand, is the cover per livestock unit (LU) or days ahead for beef farmers.

The cover/LU should be maintained around 180kg/LU or 10 to 12 days grass ahead for April once you pass magic day on your farm.

If your cover/LU exceeds 200kg and your growth is higher than demand, grass will get out of hand very quickly.

Stocking rate

Adjusting your stocking rate on the farm to get growth to equal demand is the easiest way to maintain your cover/LU.

If you are growing 60kg to 70kg grass/day and one LU is consuming 16kg of grass a day, to have a demand of 60kg to 70kg/day you need to be stocked at 3.75 to 4.4LU/ha.

Taking out surplus bales will be a short-term fix. Letting an extra paddock up for first-cut silage or taking a paddock or two out for reseeding may be a better way to help maintain your cover/LU at the desired 180kg/LU.

Reseeding

It is a good opportunity to target reseeding in April, as high growth rates in May mean you can afford to carry higher stocking rates.

Spray off the paddocks you want to reseed a week before you want to graze them. Once it’s grazed, you can then cultivate and reseed the paddock.

This really minimises the turnaround time and with the right weather conditions, the paddock could be back in the grazing rotation in six weeks.

Getting two grazings off a paddock before reseeding and achieving a six-week turnaround will give you a great chance of still growing close to the same amount of tonnes of grass of the field in the year as you would have if it wasn’t reseeded, given that you generally reseed your underperforming paddocks and new reseeds will have a high growth rate.