Devastating rainfall makes on/off grazing an essential

We are back to farming reality with a shudder here courtesy of the February deluge. During our travels to New Zealand in January we did not experience one minute of rainfall, but since our return to Oranmore, we have barely seen one hour of sunshine. What a devastating period of continuous rainfall.

At our local weather station in Athenry over 200mm fell in the first 24 days — almost treble our 2019 figures, and 1.7° colder, resulting in waterlogged ground with poor growing conditions.

This has left grazing almost impossible to achieve without significant marking of the fields, and in total contrast to spring 2019, on/off grazing is absolutely essential, with the new cubicle shed fully occupied for up to 18 hours daily.

Calving has gone exceptionally well to date, with 70pc of the herd calved in the first three weeks. Last year we went 100pc AI, so it is very encouraging to get a good start to calving

The other area we worked on was using more beef straws.

While we had a seriously busy first three weeks, calving has been troublefree to date, helped by good-quality silage, and Enda was very disciplined applying the dry cow minerals.

Calf rearing has also gone smoothly, with Kevin our secondyear Mountbellew student doing great work supporting Trish.

We again applied the Rotavirus vaccine and have been diligent about feeding the colostrum immediately after birth. Every cow’s colostrum is tested, with the refractometer stored in individual buckets with sealed lids — and the cow’s number, date and colostrum quality recorded on the lid in whiteboard marker.

Surplus is frozen and once it’s 24 hours old it is fed as transition milk.

Thankfully calves are moving for us, with the Angus and Herefords saleable locally; buyers are also willing to take a few Friesians to fill the pen.

We have a good few calves suitable for export once they are old enough. After three weeks’ calving we already have too many replacement dairy calves, even though we used beef AI on any cow with an EBI of 100 or less.

We are intending to use sexed semen early on this year and we will consider increasing the EBI threshold to maybe 115. I will come back to this discussion nearer breeding time.

Incredibly the tractor did not travel the milking platform during February with either slurry or fertiliser because of wet conditions.

This will all change as soon as the weather improves, when we will spread Urea along with some P to boost spring growth. Like last year, we will use all regular urea for the next application then switch to protected urea. I was happy with the grass growth mid-season last year so hopefully this year is as good.

Climate action

All our slurry will be spread on the outfarm silage ground with LESS and I intend to empty the lagoon with the umbilical on the grazing area mid summer as the ground dries out.

We will be feeding a 14pc ration as usual to the cows this year with plans to drop to 12pc from May, when we are feeding less and the grass is growing actively.

We intend to follow all the recommendations in the Teagasc climate action roadmap in our efforts to improve our overall carbon footprint. One change imposed on our derogation stocking rate of 2.9 cows/ ha sees it reducing to 2.7 from 2021.

This was achieved very easily by increasing the organic nitrogen figure attributed to the dairy cow from 85kg to 90kg and could be the start of a push back on stocking rate that will ultimately leave us farming without derogation.

While I am on the subject of the environment, my renewable energy crop of willow was harvested and delivered to the Edenderry electricity generating plant.

Once again this was a loss-making enterprise: when all the figures are crunched including harvesting, loading, haulage and lime, I was left with a surplus of €95 an acre per annum to pay for the land rent with no charge to spread FYM.

Calving has been trouble-free to date, helped by good-quality silage

Henry and Patricia Walsh farm in Oranmore, Co Galway, along with their son Enda and neighbour and out-farm owner John Moran