Herd test is always stressful regardless of the final results

WE SCANNED our heifers last week. While there were a few more empty than I would have liked, we were happy with the results — 92pc of them were in calf and 82pc of them are due to calve in the first 30 days.

The scan showed that some of the heifers that weren’t in calf were half-twins, which is, I suppose, an occupational hazard when you buy in replacements.

But one thing I was delighted with is that the scan showed that none of them were in calf before they came. That is always a nightmare. You don’t know what they are in calf to and they will also calve outside our designated calving period.

The empty heifers were separated from those in calf and are now going to be fattened.

This week will finish the sales of our under-16-month bulls. I have to say that they went fairly well for us, except, of course, for the price.

The first of our beef heifers, that are the cohorts of the above bulls, will be starting to go to the factory this week. These heifers are coming fit a lot quicker than I anticipated, since we had them on what we would refer to as a growing diet. But it just goes to show the value of good-quality silage. These heifers have been eating 21kg per head per day of 77 DMD silage plus 5.5kg of a barley/ oats/molasses mix.

Now that the bulls are gone, we will move them onto a finishing diet and, by the look of a lot of them, 40–50 days will bring them close to a finish.

There is a temptation to leave them on the growing diet but I just have a little concern about our silage stocks. By increasing the amount of ration, we can dramatically decrease the amount of silage they are getting.

We will also reduce the amount of silage that the suckler cows are getting by increasing their intake of straw and grain. I am confident that we have enough silage in the yard to see us out to grass but I don’t want to run it out and get ourselves into the situation where a lot of stock have to be turned out regardless of the weather.

We probably never had as much grass on the farm at this time of the year.

A while back, we spread urea on any field that was re-seeded in the last two years and, with reference to our Nutrient Management Plan,

A LARGE GROUP OF COWS AND CALVES COULD WIPE OUT A PADDOCK OVERNIGHT