Field Margins: Jim Baird discusses the pros and cons of the heat

Temperatures in the mid-20s are warm enough at times. You have to spare a thought for those down south and on the Continent, who have been enduring temperatures in the 30s for weeks now.

While our English counterparts are facing a second successive year of drought conditions, in contrast, prior to this hot spell, friends in Northern Ireland were complaining bitterly about what a poor summer they had been having.

You won’t hear any complaints from me. I would say we have been having a nice, happy, medium summer. We have grown a lot of grass and, so far, we haven’t puddled a field.

We have had our moments. One morning a few weeks back we had a biblical thunderstorm. My father reckoned it was the most rain he had ever seen fall in an hour, and he is 86. But that all ran away, and a few hours later, you would barely have known.

Since last time, we have done two cuts of silage. Second cut was done the weekend before the Highland Show and third was done exactly a month later. I wouldn’t say either of them were rocket fuel quality, but they were decent cuts and both were pitted in fair order.

In fact, in these hot conditions the challenge can be preventing overly dry silage. Third cut was cut in the afternoon. We didn’t ted it out at all. And it was all chopped and pitted by two o’clock the next afternoon.

Five cuts of silage

I set out this year with a plan to make four cuts of silage, but the way things are going I suspect we might yet make five. Five cuts just seems to fit well with the pattern of grass growth, and perhaps better suits my level of impatience. If the grass looks right, and the weather is obliging, it is difficult to pass up an opportunity. You just don’t know if there is another one coming.

Managing grazing has just been challenging enough this year. The third grazing rotation is always a tricky one as grass just wants to go to seed around that time. That was compounded this year by the fact that it coincided with a burst of growth.

Covers of grass got very strong, so almost all of the third grazing round saw a mower, either to be baled, or pre or post mowed. We have had about five different goes at baling and we have a stack of around 180 bales to show for it. Never a bad thing.

Weather through that spell rarely seemed favourable enough for pre-mowing, so the majority of the paddocks were cut immediately after the cows had done their best at grazing. The poor old mower spent most of June absolutely splattered with dung.

Feast to famine

The challenge then flips going into the fourth grazing round. Because fields have just been ‘rumped’ down from high covers, grass recovery tends to be slower. It is easy to go from feast to famine very quickly, and often we find ourselves needing to feed fresh silage bales straight back to the cows.

Grass recovery wasn’t too bad this year, but in early July the grass in front of cows was very soft and lush, and just seemed to go straight through them. It didn’t matter how much I gave them, they were not content. We had to put bales back through the feeder to get fibre in to their rumens, and thankfully that slowed the rate of passage and settled everything down.

We are into the fifth grazing round now and everything seems back on an even keel. We have a good wedge of sound quality grass to go at, and grazing down to low residuals is not difficult in this nice weather.

Quality grass is slightly wasted on our cows at this stage. They are approaching drying off time and average yield per cow is down into the teens of litres per cow per day. There is no concentrate feed going in at all now. The first batch of heifers are already dry and come the end of the month, drying off cows will become a weekly task.

We did our pre‑drying‑off final scan the other week. We finished up with 20‑odd empty cows, which is less than 10%, so not too bad. However, I had been soft and left the bull in for a couple of weeks longer than the rigid 12-week period we did last year. Eight cows should be thankful for that.

Despite our best efforts, we haven’t quite knocked it out of the park breeding‑wise last time.

Our calving block is not going to be quite as front loaded as last year. As I mentioned previously, I think our milking heifers have been the main source of slippage. But even our maiden heifers still ended up frustratingly with a 10% empty rate, despite us throwing a bull and AI at them initially.

Breeding KPIs

We will need to do some further analysis of our breeding KPIs and see if there is anything that we should be approaching differently next time. To be honest I am short on ideas at the moment. It didn’t help that one of our bulls fell by the wayside mid-breeding last season. I think we will be looking for a couple of Angus bulls this year, so we can have a bit of reserve bull power.

Cows are clever things, sometimes too clever for their own good. Number 38 is one of our friendliest and favourite cows. But she developed a potentially life-shortening habit. Initially she discovered that if she got down on her front knee she could reach further under the electric fence than anyone else could.

She then twigged that if she put her shoulder on the fence pins she could push them over a bit and reach even further. It developed to the stage that every fence pin was well pushed about and more and more often the wire would drop out and all the cows would pile over it. At times I was having to double fence as an insurance. It was just getting well beyond a joke.

The ultimate solution was potentially Lanark market, but I wanted to avoid that. The answer I came up with was to put a collar round her neck with a wire sticking up from it acting as an aerial. If she ducked under the fence, the aerial touches it and gives her a tingle. She was initially most indignant about it, but it has worked a treat and since then I haven’t had a single fence pin leaning over when I go to bring the cows in.

Returning to the heat, I have been down South a few times these last few weeks. The Nuffield Dairy Group study trip was in Yorkshire. The European Dairy Farmers congress was in Cheshire. And I was back down at this year’s Groundswell in Hertfordshire. As well as it being plenty warm enough for a fair-skinned Celt, a topic of discussion at all of them was how farming needs to adapt if these heat waves are going to become the norm.

We visited some high profile intensively housed dairy systems where cows were showing levels of heat stress that I have never witnessed before. In high yielding systems like these, cows' bodies are already performing at a very high metabolic rate, and the addition of temperature stress like this can have significant production and health and welfare implications.

Heat stress

In last week’s Scottish Farmer there was an article highlighting how much milk production has fallen across Europe this last month due to the heat. There are milk production systems in countries around the World with much more extreme climates than Europe. But they have sophisticated cooling systems, so perhaps we need to think about more of such investments over here?

Perhaps we need to consider growing a wider variety of crops to spread the risk? Maybe we need to consider more multi-species or deeper rooting plant species that are less susceptible to drought? It could be that we need to graze grass differently, perhaps at higher covers and leave more residual grass to give the soil more protection from the heat?

It might be that the prime areas for farming are changing – moving north? An English friend of mine winds me up that Lanarkshire is becoming the new Cheshire. I am not sure I want to encourage that thinking. We should probably keep that secret to ourselves.