When Oisin Gill returned home to farm alongside his father Matt, the obvious weaknesses on the farm in his eyes was the grassland management and the cow type. That was 10 years ago.

Since then, Oisin has become a Grass Pod host farmer. Grass Pod is like a discussion group, but it is open to all farmers and the focus is on grassland management. It is organised and facilitated by Vincent Griffith of Aurivo Co-op.

Every month, about 15 or so farmers from the south Mayo region do a grass walk on the Gill farm. Oisin is now heading into his third year as the host farmer. For the first few months, the focus was on the actual measuring of grass and learning the basics about dry matters, growth rates and average farm covers.

Since then, the focus has switched to management – learning and sharing information about spring rotation planners, grass budgets, soil fertility, fertiliser strategy and autumn closing management. Progress has been steady, with Oisin achieving annual increases in total grass growth and utilisation.

It’s not as though there wasn’t a focus on grass and grazing to begin with; most of the 54ha grazing block at Hollymount, Co Mayo, was paddocked off a central roadway by Matt in the 1980s.

Access to most of the farm is reasonably good, with only the large silage fields not having good roadway access.

The basic infrastructure was in place – the biggest change has been to tweak management to get more out of grass and the overall farm.

About 100 spring-calving cows were traditionally milked on the farm. The Gill farm and the land around Hollymount is good and dry, but it is still in a high rainfall area and you don’t have to look too far to find rushes and scrub land.

Over the last few years, cow numbers have increased steadily and this year somewhere between 140 and 150 cows will be milked, so stocking rate will be around 2.68 cows/ha on the milking block.

The original paddocks were designed for 100 cows and were long and narrow. Oisin took up every second wire last year so the paddocks are now twice as big and he can get three grazings per paddock in the summer.

Cows

I visited on Tuesday of last week. It was raining all morning. When I got there, the cows were in the shed, but there was no silage in front of them as Oisin was still planning to let them out to grass. They had been out grazing all of the night before, like they had been since 9 February. Up to then, they were out by day since the first cow calved on 1 February.

“It makes a huge difference to the workload by having them out. Not having to clean cubicles down twice a day and having the cows coming into the parlour clean is a huge help too,” Oisin says.

Since then, cows have had to be housed fully on numerous occasions due to the bad weather. Oisin says when the cows are in, it adds about an hour to milking, but the desire and the ability is to get as much grass into cows as possible.

The problem for Oisin was that the conversion of this grass to milk solids was exceptionally poor.

The EBI of his Holstein Friesian herd was well below the national average at €28 in September 2016. This was despite using high-EBI bulls for the last number of years.

The effect of the low EBI was being seen on the ground. Despite good grassland management, the average protein content for 2016 was 3.17% and fat was 3.83%.

According to the co-op performance report from ICBF, the Aurivo average for protein in 2016 was 3.41% and the average fat was 4.17%. The top 10% in Aurivo were achieving a protein of 3.59% and a fat of 4.46%.

The other effect of the low EBI was on fertility. According to the same report, the calving interval for 2016 was 408 days and only 40% of the cows calved within the first six weeks. Cows were calving from January to May.

The herd was always spring-calving and the Gills are commercial farmers – it wasn’t as though they were picking bulls for show cows.

The herd that they had was the result of just using the wrong genetics for grass-based systems over many years – but these were the bulls that were being sold.

In 2016, Oisin decided to only breed for 12 weeks. The result was that 50 cows, or about one third of the herd, was empty. This was expected and his intention was to sell these along with the in-calf heifers and purchase in 60 high-EBI cows.

Dud

This plan was dealt a blow when it was discovered that the bull running with the heifers was a dud. The result was that none of the heifers went in-calf, so these were not sold. They have since been served and will be sold as autumn-calvers later in the year.

However, Oisin went ahead with the plan and bought 60 Jersey-crossbred heifers from three farmers. Some of the heifers came from Waterford while the rest came from Galway and Mayo.

“The reason for the change was all down to milk price. Last year, we averaged 23.9c/l while the Aurivo average was 26.4c/l and the top 10% were getting 28.5c/l. It was totally disheartening to be getting texts with proteins barely above 3% when I knew the grass was good.

“We’re already noticing a difference. In the last few texts, protein has been above 3.65% and fat has been around 5%. That’s the highest I’ve ever seen solids, even in autumn.”

Last year, the herd sold 373kg of milk solids per cow from about 750kg of meal. This year, Oisin expects milk solids per cow to be similar, but with lower volumes and from less meal.

With a high proportion of heifers in the herd, it will take a while for the herd to mature and realise its new potential.

So why crossbred and why not breed your own replacements? “I went for Jersey-crossbreds because they have the highest solids. We could’ve bought black and white heifers, but I don’t think they’d produce as much milk solids from a smaller, hardy cow.

“If I was to breed the cow I bought, it would take me years and I’d still be playing catch-up. Selling the herd was the best thing for this farm,” Oisin says.

The Gill farm is a busy spot at the moment. Three cows calved while I was there. Matt is currently out of action recovering from a serious health issue, so Oisin is being helped on the farm by Mark Biggins and Paul Colleran.

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