How a month vanishes at this time of year is so unreal, April is just around the corner! Winter has passed #hopefully🤞 as we start thinking about breeding season approaching. After some damping weather in late February and early March (which we needed), we housed the cows and on/off grazed for a couple of weeks which makes you appreciate that amazing February we had for an early turnout and not having to do much on/off grazing.

Grass has been growing very well and getting out in early Febuary has been a great result with the regrowth looking good for the pending second round. We have grazed 75% of the farm and we won’t hit the 100% mark as we have had two weeks of positive growth of 42 and 54 kgs/dm/ha with a demand of approximatley 30kgs/dm/ha! We have removed silage from the diet and dropped the cake in the parlour to 2kgs/head/per day.

We have started to take surplus paddocks out for silage and we have started to roll outlying silage fields to roll all the stones in and flatten any grazing damage. Fencing repairs and general farm tidy up is in full swing. God I love this time of year!

The 12> month old bulling heifers have had their Leptovoid, Bvd and Huskvac and after a short period back inside whilst we had some wet weather are backing out grazing and starting to bull like mad.

The cows are starting to hit the residuals now the silage and a reduction in parlour feed has taken place. We know that it is our goal to hit that 1500 residual after every grazing but whilst buffer feeding and wet weather conditions take place it can be challenging to control so many variables, with that in mind the focus is always on the cows. The constant questions in our minds, intakes? are we fufiling their needs! Its a balancing act and the driver for any grazing farmer #hittingthesweetspot

The calves are starting to grow and some groups are now on oad (once a day) feeding and starting to eat their creep and will be heading to be weaned in a week or two.

Droning on!

Its great to get the drone out and start getting some footage of the cows coming in for milking, its still one of my favourite things to do on the farm, getting the cows in gives you time to think, look and assess what’s going on! Don’t get me wrong I am a full believer in getting the Battlatch on for the mornings but getting the cows in in an afternoon cannot be beaten! #qualitythinkingtime

It was really nice to finally get a frost, we always think it does wonders for the grass in nutriliasing the taste (wether its true or not). Once you have frost the cows always seem to graze really well. We have a bunch of late calvers out at grass assisting on the grazing platform to eat some of those winter pastures not utilised yet.

As we head into April we will be doing a team AI refresher course to make sure everyone is up to date with the current procedures and we continue to focus on the cows and make sure the team is in the right place for the up coming breeding season. Our second round of grazing starts on Tuesday and we have topped up some silage ground and some paddocks that we have removed early from the next round with 60kgs of Nitram per/ha.