The pros and
highlighted a simple demonstration on the amount of meal required per day to feed Michael’s 140 weanlings when producing high quality versus low quality silage.
The average target daily gain for the winter with these animals is 0.6kgs per day.
In order to achieve this level of performance, feeding these animals high quality silage of 72pc DMD would require 1kg per head per day or less than six bags of ration for the group.
In contrast if poor quality silage of 62pc DMD was used then the requirement would be 3kgs per head per day, equalling 18 bags of ration per day.
Over a four and a half month winter the difference in meal required would be 38 tonnes.
At €250/t, that is an additional €9,500 extra feed cost to achieve the same level of performance from good to poor quality silage.
With a small bit of planning and management there is huge gain to be achieved from producing high quality silage on your farm.
The table below shows the average daily gain achieved with silage alone and the recommended concentrate feeding level at different silage qualities. A NUMBER of winter milk producers are currently calving cows and many of these calves will be sold on to beef farmers to be reared and slaughtered in a calf to beef system. There are advantages and disadvantages to consider when deciding whether to buy calves at this time of year or not.
CALF AVAILABILITY
With more and more dairy farmers moving away from winter milk, over 90pc of herds are now calving in the spring time making autumn born calves very difficult to source at this time of year. Due to the lack of numbers it can also be very