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Grass growth remains steady at 68kg/DM/ha and demand is running at 49kg/DM/ha.
Although there has been a good deal of rain, grazing conditions are still quite good.
We have increased our days ahead figure to 16 and the plan is to build this by about one-and-a-half days a week until the end of August to leave us at 22 days ahead by 1 September.
The plan is to spread more paddocks with 20 units of nitrogen per acre next week and one bag per acre of muriate of potash in September to build potassium levels across the farm.
Average farm cover
Average farm cover is 714/kg/Ha and the farm is currently stocked at 3.26 LU/ha or 2432kg/ha.
All calves were weighed prior to the open day on 21 July. Male calves weighed 216kg and have gained 1.3kg/day since birth and female calves weighed 200kg and gained 1.2kg/day since birth.
Calves
Calves are starting to creep graze underneath fences ahead of cows and some longer type plastic stakes have been purchased to rise the fence to encourage more calves to forward creep graze.
Male calves and female calves were split up and there are currently two groups of cows and one group of in-calf heifers on the farm.
Dairy beef heifer AAx and Hex calves were also weighed and they are 133kg and have gained 1.01kg/day over the past 30 days.
They have gained 0.7kg/day since birth – still a little behind target but are performing well at the moment.
Faecal samples
The calves are still getting 0.8kg/ration/day. All calves have been faecal sampled three times at this stage and although all samples have returned clear, some coughing was observed at weighing and the decision was made to dose all 171 calves on the farm.
A white oral dose was used. Other jobs for this week include finish-ploughing some sprayed-off paddocks, starting a small drainage job in one of the paddocks and spraying a recent reseed for weeds.
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