Jim Baird discusses the summer grazing and making good silage

With the forecast for at least a settled week in front of us, it looks like our grazing season is going to end very much in the pleasant vein it has largely been all summer.

If I could bottle the summer weather of 2025 and reuse it again and again, I definitely would.

It is such a bonus to be able to bring stock inside when it suits them, rather than be forced inside by dodgy ground conditions. That said, grass is continuing to grow at such a rate that we are actually still struggling a bit to keep up with it. Not a problem you would expect in mid-October.

Seven year old Isla Pateron helping to feed the new calves(Image: web)

As we head through the backend we try to get grass covers down to a sensible level. I like to leave enough cover of grass to help the plants retain some strength and give the ground some protection through the winter. But we don’t want to leave too much grass that risks winter kill if we get heavy snow or hard frosts.

Currently we have more fields than we would like with strong covers of grass. We have a religious aversion to wintering sheep, and I don’t fancy making silage bales in October, so we need to get cows over them to tidy up soon.

Our freshly calved cows are all housed full time. As are our close-up dry cows, anything within four weeks of calving. That leaves us with a mob of around 70 later calving dry cows that are currently rotating around the highest cover paddocks.

To be fair to them they are doing a nice job of tidying up, and this dry weather certainly helps. My challenge is that a chunk of these cows are due to be housed soon to be tuned up for calving. We risk running out of mouths before we run out of grass.

To help get on top of this I have brought our yearling heifers back from the farm they winter away at. They were about to be housed round there but I think they will do more good back here for a few weeks. It is a bit of a nonsense hauling them back and forth, but they can shift a bit of grass and they are lighter on their feet if the weather does turn wet on us.

As well as the grazing paddocks, we now also have silage aftermath regrowth coming on. I hadn’t planned to graze these, but because recovery has been so strong we will need to run some mouths round them and nip them down a bit as well.

We were very fortunate to get fifth cut silage done September 25. Making silage at that time of year can be dicey, but thankfully a decent few days came along in the nick of time. Five cuts done with no effluent to show for it, that doesn’t happen many years.

We will get silages sampled and analysed shortly and fine tune our ration. Time will tell how well cows do on these silages and whether we feel five cuts is definitely the way forward. With the milk price starting to tick down a bit we might want to look at our concentrate feeding rate and whether we should ask more of our forages.

That will also depend on how confident we are that we have enough silage to last out. I can’t say that pits look as full as I have seen them in the past. I keep trying to reassure myself that what is in them is all high dry matter stuff and hopefully high feed-value gear.

It is definitely dense stuff. At silage time we always have a telehandler rolling the pit constantly alongside the buckrake man. It is amazing how firmly these low fibre crops pack down, especially if you can get a bit of wilt on the grass.

I do feel that if we haven’t grown enough silage in a year like this, then I think we do need to ask some hard questions of ourselves. Are we needing to review our frugal nitrogen inputs policy? Are we needing to get more proactive on the reseeding front? Should we be carrying less cows? Let’s see how the winter goes.

Just on a similar note, and following up on my previous article when I wrote about the damper patches of some of our fourth-cut silage fields going yellow. One of my friends from way back in my uni days got in touch with the theory that it could have been anaerobic denitrification. That wasn’t something on my radar, but he is an arable farmer and finds that some wetter or heavier parts of fields can sour because they are actually losing nitrogen to the atmosphere.

That could well be a sound explanation and perhaps the combination of slurry and the deluge of rain we had sealed up the soil and created favourable conditions for the bacteria involved in this process. It does beg the question what could we have done to avoid it? The field had been aireating rolled two days before so I kind of think what more could we have done than that?

We certainly had no such issues with fifth cut. Fields looked tremendous right through. In fact, fifth cut was probably our heaviest cut of the year. I don’t know whether the dung we spread had an impact or not. You would think it can’t have done any harm.

On the cow front we are right in the thick of calving now. More than 80 calved in a bit over a fortnight. So far it has been reasonably steady and uneventful, which to be honest is the best you can ask for. We haven’t had any crazy days with big numbers and we have only seen the vet twice for a couple of twisted wombs, one that needed a caesarean.

The start of calving always feels like all hassle with very little milk to show for it. But it is good once you get past that and the system irons itself out. You get into the groove, and you quickly see milk tickets jumping up at a rate of knots.

The transition ration pre-calving seems to be doing its job so far. Cows are calving with minimum intervention, there have been very few retained cleansings, and they seem to be getting in to their milking stride fairly quickly. The only fly in the ointment is still a few milk fevers.

A big focus, as always, is getting colostrum into calves as quickly as possible. That gives them the very best start to life. With block calving, if we can get a big number of calves through the system, in clean sheds, before any bugs get a hold, it makes such a difference. That is the theory. Fingers crossed.

If I can finish with a plug for this years Nuffield conference. This year it is at Aberdeen at the P&J Live on November 19 and 20. If you have any thoughts of a Nuffield or just want some positivity and to see what scholars have been exploring on their travels, you would be very much welcome. Check out the Nuffield Farming Trust website if you are interested.