How the dreaded TB test is delaying our turnout

We are in a situation on the farm that we have never been in before at this time of the year: we have plenty of grass.

Even though we are still getting plenty of rain, the lengthening of the days means ground conditions are improving.

In any other year, in these circumstances, we would have started to turn stock out. But when the notification came that we had to do our second TB test this year (because a cow reacted in the factory last November), we decided we wouldn’t turn out any stock until it was done.

I felt that the logistics of rounding up the cattle within a few weeks of turning them out would turn an already stressful event into a nightmare. I don’t imagine that the cattle would be too impressed either, especially the second day.

But we have done all the other jobs we need to do in preparation for turnout: all vaccinations are up to date, cows have their tails trimmed and probably the most time-consuming job of all, the lists have been written.

These lists are groups of stock batched by calf age and gender. Each list shows the calves and their dams and the fields they will be grazing.

The bull calves are batched by age and the heifers by size.

The bulls will stay in their group for the rest of their time. When they are grazed in the one group, with no mixing, we find that they are more settled. And the more settled they are, the better they thrive.

There is no management reason for batching the heifers by size; it’s just that the groups look better when they are even.

The cows that were scanned not in-calf that are rearing bull calves will be weaned as they go out to grass. The calves will stay with their group and the empty cows will go to grass for fattening, joining with 1½-yearold heifers that are also being fattened.

The scanning was done a few weeks ago and the results were mixed but we were satisfied with them overall.

83pc of the heifers scanned in-calf. While that seems very low, when we were selecting the heifers for breeding, we inadvertently picked some that were half-twins, and these were infertile.

The other thing is that they will be calving at 24 months and also we only run the bulls with the heifers for eight weeks.

I have also noticed that three of the in-calf heifers are very wild, and we certainly won’t be re-breeding them.

As for the cows, 92pc of them scanned in calf, with seven of them carrying twins. Most of the empty cows were older ones, who have had seven calves or more. This backs up our view that a large herd needs to be kept young to maximise productivity.

78pc of the cows and heifers are due to calve within the first month. So it’s not looking good for holidays in August!

Another job we have done is to weigh all the cows and calves for SCEP. On one of the many recent wet afternoons, I decided to analyse these weights, insofar as I could.

The heaviest bull calf weighed 366kg down to the lightest at 148kg, with the average 292kg. This represents an average daily weight gain from birth of 1.26kg, with a spread of 1.56kg/day down to 0.9kg/day.

The heifer calves ranged from 124kg to 363kg down to 134kg. They averaged 272kg. This represented an average daily weight gain of 1.17kg. The spread was 0.8-1.49kg/day.

The cows showed up some startling results. The heaviest cow came in at 938kg, with the lightest less than half her weight, at 430kg. The average was 673kg.

Eleven of the cows weighed over 800kg, and we won’t be rebreeding them next season, because they are just needlessly heavy for our system. We feel 650kg is a nice solid weight for a suckler cow.

Having said that, we will be interested in ICBF’s Weanling Performance Report on our SCEP weights. The ultimate measure of a suckler cow is the quality and size of the calf standing beside her. We need to be producing calves with a superior growth rate.

We have also started to spread some fertiliser. Looking at our most recent soil samples, and also trying to find the best value, we opted to go with 18.6.12 on the grazing ground. So far, we have spread a bag and a half to the acre on the grazing fields that are dry.

We have also spread the fertiliser on our winter cereals.

We put 4cwt/ac of 10.5.25 +S. It was a bit messy. The ground conditions were less than ideal and the tramlines are quite mucky. But the barley was starting to yellow a little, so we had little choice. We also put 2cwt/ ac of the same fertiliser on the wheat. That will get another 2cwt later.

‘We won’t be rebreeding these cows next season, because they are just needlessly heavy for our system’