Exceptional spring growth on farm with heavy soils

The attendance at a recent Teagasc/Kerry Agribusiness farm walk held on a dairy Heavy Soils Monitor farm in Athea in West Limerick heard the host farmer John Leahy describe the exceptional grass growth that occurred on his elevated dairy farm this spring.

John had measured grass growth on eight occasions this spring. Across all his paddockssome of very heavy clay soil type- he recorded grass growth of 1.23 tonnes/ha up to April 10th. Growth ranged from 0.25 tonnes on the heavy ‘ turned’ ground to 2 tonnes DM / ha on the better higher soil fertility soil types.

John outlined to the attendance how he had improved soil fertility over the past few years which enabled him to exploit the higher soil temperature conditions that prevailed this spring.

Since 2014 John applied over 350 tonnes of ground limestone to his 40 ha milking block and 20 ha outblock. This has raised average soil pH to 6.5.

He is now getting double the response to fertiliser applications.

In addition each year John has applied the 27kgs chemical phosphorous/ha and 15kgs slurry P/ha to his milking block to help improve the phosphorus status of his soils which is now at Index 2.

The first nitrogen application of 25 units urea per acre was applied on January 20 by quad on 80% of the land and this was followed with a second half bag of urea per acre in early March.

In early April John applied 2 bags/acre of 18.6.12 to all his grazing ground.

John started grazing for a few hours on Feb 15 and continued on-off grazing until March 10, by day and evening from March 13 and housed fulltime March 17.

Then it was on –off grazing again from March 22 and fulltime grazing since March 25. He had grazed 40% of the milking block by March 31.

The network of farm roads, spur roads and multiple access points to paddocks greatly helped John to get grass in the cows diet with minimal damage to swards this spring.

The first paddocks grazed in mid-Febuary had a cover of 1100kgs/Ha on April 13th and this combined with very good grazing conditions prompted John to start the second round a full two weeks earlier that last year.

This allowed him take out 1.9ha of very high covers (>2500 Kgs/ha) for baled silage.

The very compact calving (75 % calved Feb 6-March 1) is greatly helping grass utilisation in April as cows are long enough calved to have grass intakes of +16kgs DM/day.

Magnesium and trace elements are supplied through the water.

On the day of the farm walk (April 21) the attendance saw the tremendous grass quality on the second round paddocks and the high grazing pressure applied by John to clean out paddocks fully in good grazing conditions.

John Leahy has put a management/ farm infrastructure, calving pattern and soil fertility programme in place that is maximising the grass growth and utilisation potential of his farm.

The farm has been able to fully exploit the unusually mild weather conditions prevailing this spring.

This reduces the reliance of this heavy soils farm on imported feed and increases the milk solid production from grass-all key components of a high profit dairy system.