It’s time for plan B as weather scuppers our spring grazing and slurry targets

OUR plans for spring grazing have certainly gone out the window this year. Some of it was our own fault but it also certainly exposed the key weakness of calendar farming.

We would always have closed up our grazing fields in rotation in the autumn; the driest fields first because they are the fields that you are going to get the best chance to get out to graze early in the spring. As we are constantly told, any grass that is grazed in late February/early March is grass that was grown in October.

While we didn’t have huge covers on these fields this spring, there was certainly enough grass to warrant early turnout of some stock.

Our plan would have been to graze off these covers and then apply 2,500 gallons slurry/acre.

But, unfortunately, Mother Nature had other ideas.

Ground got so wet that we could not get out to graze these fields without doing a lot of poaching.

So we waited and waited and waited, for ground conditions to improve but unfortunately it was the other way that it was going.

While we were waiting, our slurry tanks were getting fuller and fuller. So it ended up that we had to go spread slurry on these drier fields with their covers of grass, which ended up being a total mess.

These fields are now quite wet on the surface because of the slurry and the grass is contaminated with slurry.

So its not looking good to get a grazing off these fields at all this spring.

Apart from missing out of the grazing, it greatly concerns me that we might actually end up contaminating next year’s silage.

Surely there must be a better way of managing slurry spreading at a national level!

For instance, if you think back, this past winter, there was a dry spell when conditions were quite good, in December.

Would it not be possible to have a notification system from the Department in conjunction with Met Eireann that, when conditions are suitable, we would be allowed to spread. When they are not suitable, you don’t spread. Obviously this would need to be policed – but I’d have no problem with that.

We scanned our heifers a few weeks ago. We have 36 in-calf out of 40, over an eight-week breeding cycle. Two of the four that weren’t in-calf showed up in the scan to be unsuitable for breeding and were probably halftwins. These four heifers are now being fattened.

One of the good things that showed up in the scan is that none of the heifers were in calf when they arrived on the farm.

It used to be a problem a few years ago, with bought-in replacements. But since we started buying our replacement heifers