Are you ready for grazing 2022?
Ready Even At Picture: Are For Turnout? You Or This Have Out Stage? Got Images Istock/getty Stock You
It has been a fantastic beginning to 2022 on the weather front. Well below-average rainfall and soil temperatures remain between 6 and 7 degrees in many areas.
Are you ready for turnout? Or have you even got stock out at this stage? There is so much to do around the farm before stock can get out grazing.
Water troughs, electric fences, gates, ditches, etc. - all need to be checked and made ready for the year ahead. It’s hard to get around to everything while you are managing stock indoors.
For those doing regular soil analysis on land, acting on those results is an important part of the process.
As I have mentioned so many times, lime is the cheapest and oft most ignored fertiliser available to us.
On my travels around the country, I have seen a lot of lime go out since last autumn. Low pH soils will not grow grass efficiently and will make your purchased fertiliser very expensive per kilo of grass dry matter grown.
Obviously, with current fertiliser prices, this is even more important to get right.
So, one of the big jobs pre-turnout must be to ensure that your soil fertility is right for the year ahead.
Strategic use of slurry can be a cost-effective way of improving soil fertility also. The merits of watering down your slurry are well known at this point, as it ensures that more of the nutrients get into the soil - and this is particularly the case for the nitrogen contained in the slurry.
Once you have all the fieldwork sorted, make sure that your stock are ready for the fields. This is important to optimise grass utilisation.
Keep intakes and protein content of diets up to a level appropriate for the type cattle right up to leaving them out as this will ensure that their grass intake is as good as possible once out.
Lameness can often be a hidden problem when stock are indoors. When animals are in restricted accommodation like slatted pens, lameness may go unnoticed - this may be particularly true of bigger type continental suckler cows.
Some will notice that heavily in-calf cows are finding it difficult to stand quickly. As younger animals get bigger through the winter, space may get tight in pens.
Watch what you are feeding animals as in some cases the diet may make animals more prone to laminitis due to acidosis.
Make a plan for the successful breeding of your replacement heifers in both beef and dairy herds.
Do you have a minimum weight for your breeding heifers? Should weight be the parameter, or should we be looking at size and frame for age?
Remember that a fleshy animal can weigh but easily lose weight, but a tall well-framed animal can't get shorter!
If using weight then, it should relate to the weight of your mature cows.
Given the year we have just had, most heifers did very well on grass and were housed in good order. It would do no harm to separate out the smaller heifers intended for the bull now.
That way you can increase feeding to them now and keep them as a separate group while indoors and for a while outdoors before you commence breeding. By doing this you can feed concentrates if necessary to them right up to breeding to achieve target breeding weight and size.
Begin sire selection for AI, so that you have a bit of time to do some research. If a stock bull is to be used, he should be on the farm sooner rather than later so that he is well settled in before being put to work.
It is ok for sucklers to lose some body condition after calving but not excessive loss. On most farms, it will be necessary to feed very little concentrates to cows rearing calves due to good silage quality.
However, if silage is not of good quality, you must address this issue immediately after the cows have calved to prevent excessive condition loss. Feed a good quality mix which will contribute to good milk quality and maintain the cow herself.
Base the protein content of the mix on the silage protein and the type of cow you are feeding.
Minerals post-calving also play a role in achieving good fertility. This can be fed in many ways depending on the farm, but it should be attended to.
Cows will take a little time to build up their intakes post-calving. Cows will be eating 10-11kg of dry matter at a barrier inside pre-calving, and once calved, we would like them to be eating 18-20kg as soon as possible.
This is harder to achieve if we dramatically change their environment and feed. Aim to reduce stress and disturbance as much as possible in the first week of lactation.
The weather is excellent and there is plenty of grass outside, but I would stress how important it is to not send fresh cows out for prolonged grazing immediately post-calving.
It takes the rumen 21 days to adjust to a change of diet, so introduce dairy cows to grass gradually. By all means, give them three or four hours at grass in once calved but leave it at that.
Furthermore, there is no guarantee this early in the year that they will be able to remain grazing for the rest of the spring. Hopefully, they can!
