Farmer Focus: Relief as spring calving draws to a close
Eurig Jenkins © Richard Stanton I look back over February with some relief, as we have calved 225 cows – 50% of them in 12 days – and a total of 325 have calved to date.
The first week was fine, with heifers coughing calves out, but weeks two and three saw the sheer volume of calves constantly arriving in the calving pen.
See also: Benefits of weighing dairy heifers to improve efficiency
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We have a simple system of identification, which we have been using since early 2000: a yellow, LIC plastic-coated book.
It gets some abuse and random stains, and occasionally gets lost for a couple of hours when someone has put it down on top of a wall, or the old man has decided to hijack it to the office in an attempt to match numbers of cows we don’t have.
Things have eased off now, and we only have about 20 cows in straw yards in preparation for calving, compared with nearly 70 the odd night in previous weeks.
The only bad luck we have had yet is a slight lack of Friesian heifer calves, which could be 40 less than a good year with similar semen usage.
Yearlings are still having an awful time on paddock grazing, but surprised us with an average weight of 255kg – only 10kg under target
With all staff on maximum hours to get everything done before a target 6pm finish, Sara asked my dad, “Why do we calve in February?”
Without any hesitation, he replied that it’s too wet to do anything else.
So, apart from having all adult cows housed and fed with a plentiful supply of silage and 4.8kg of concentrates in parlour, we are hoping for a dry spell to turn them out.
It’s been too wet to do a grass walk for opening cover, but as soon as conditions allow, we will have a good number of hungry cows to go at the grass.
We did apply slurry over some silage ground just to keep the pressure off the slurry pit, as it has a tendency to fill up pretty quickly as soon as we start to produce milk.
Yearlings, on the other hand, are still having an awful time on paddock grazing, but surprised us with an average weight of 255kg – only 10kg under target and gaining 0.89kg/day.
This is an increase on 0.5kg/day weight gain during December, so obviously the 1.5kg of concentrates (2.3kg/day for the lightest 40) have made a huge difference.
We are cutting it back to 1kg and 2kg respectively for March, as we still have a lot of grass left to go through.