Young bulls still have a lot of ground to make up after the summer drought

IHAVE a new-found love — for round bales of silage. The ones we have at the moment are certainly coming in very handy. If only we had more of them.

Our usual practice this time of the year, regardless of the weather, would be to put the cows and calves into the shed and let our store heifers graze off any grass that is around the farm.

But all that has gone out the window this year.

Because we are so short of silage, the longer we can avoid opening the pits, the better. The excellent ground conditions at the moment are making that a little easier. A bale of silage a day to each group of cows is leaving them very contented.

We have very little ground closed up for an early spring bite. While it may be short-sighted, that’s not our priority at the moment.

As we let cows and calves into a fresh paddock, we are still leaving them access to the paddocks they have already grazed. While that is not best practice, I think it is fully justified in our present circumstances.

The more space the cows and calves have, the more contented they appear to be.

The grass now is very soft and probably high in Nitrogen. So even though the cows have access to Hi-Mag mineral buckets, we lost a cow to grass tetany last week.

Luckily, we used up all our slurry on the stubble ground. If we had waited until the last few days of spreading, we would have got ourselves into a corner, insofar as we would have had to spread the slurry on pasture that still had a lot of grass left on it.

The breeding season seems to be going well, or at least, there seems to be plenty of cows cycling and the bulls are extremely busy.

We have recorded quite a few of the jumbo numbers of the cows we had seen being served and we need to be watching them from this week onwards for any repeats.

We will also think about rotating the bulls next week.

Whenever the cows do come in, we have a diet ready to go. Instead of the usual 35kg silage per day, we will be using 25kg per head per day of good silage, with the remainder of the diet being balanced with oaten straw Maxammon-treated barley and oats, along with a good dairy mineral.

With this diet, when everything is in the shed, we would hope to be saving about 2.5 tonnes of silage per day, 300-350 tonnes in total, depending on the length of the winter. Hopefully that will be enough.

The under-16-month bulls are eating 12kg ration per head per day plus some silage and straw and they are finally starting to look like beef bulls. But I still think we are going to have to make a decision on whether we will sell some of the more muscled bulls by 16 months or whether we will let them grow on further. They still have a lot of ground to make up after the summer. We will soon know where we stand as the first of these bulls will be due for sale at the end of the month.

We sold some Angus heifers at 15 months two weeks ago. These were grass-fed but supplemented with barley at 2.5kg per head per day for the last month. While they were light, at around 240kg carcase, they were nicely finished. Because of their size, it wouldn’t have justified putting them into the shed, only adding more expense.

The ones that are left will probably be sent next week, with the exception of a few that need a bit more time.

The winter barley is fully emerged and looks well, although crows seemed to be a real problem. As far as we can see, they seem to be just pulling the green shoots as they emerge and then leave it lying there on the surface with the seed exposed. So they’re not eating it at all.

The winter oats and winter wheat are just emerging, and the crows seem to be doing the same there. In winter or spring, I don’t think we ever sowed crops in as good conditions.

Before, during and after sowing, the stones were picked. All crops were rolled off immediately after sowing. They were also all sprayed for weeds. One of the down sides of the real dry conditions seems to be that we brought up more stones than usual.

So, all going well, we won’t have to go back near the tillage until we think about spreading fertiliser in the spring.

WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION ON WHETHER WE WILL SELL SOME OF THE MORE MUSCLED BULLS BY 16 MONTHS OR WHETHER WE WILL LET THEM GROW ON FURTHER.