Grass growth has returned to farms, but growth rates are below what many farmers would of been hoping for after a challenging year.

Most farmers were hoping for high growth rates once the weather had broken, but that has not materialised.

Failure to build adequately heavy covers may lead to silage being introduced earlier than expected and lead to early housing of cows.

Grass growth

Last week, growth rates were expected to be in the 70s; this week, growth rates have fallen back into the mid to high 60s.

According to PastureBase Ireland, for the coming week growth rates are expected to reach 67kg dry matter [DM]/ha in Leinster, 66kg DM/ha in Munster, 64kg DM/ha in Connacht and 64kg DM/ha in Ulster.

These growth rates are below what many farmers would have been hoping for, but a mini-heatwave is expected during the week which may improve growth rates in some areas.

Advice

The advice remains the same; continue walking your farm every five to seven days, so you can manage you grass as best as possible.

You should now be focused on building your average farm cover to set the farm up for autumn grazing.

Your rotation length should now be 25 days and depending on your stocking rate, your average farm cover should be between 500kg DM/ha and 770kg DM/ha.

The stocking rate on the milking platform should of been reduced by either reintroducing the silage ground onto the milking platform, or removing youngstock from the platform.

Breeding 2021

The 2021 breeding season has drawn to a close on the majority of spring-calving dairy herds across the country, with artificial insemination (AI) stopping and bulls removed.

But if recent data is anything to go by, some ‘spring-calving’ herds have continued to breed cows passed the desired breeding end date.

Almost 390,000 dairy cows – more than one-quarter of spring-calving Irish dairy cows – calved later than April 1, in 2019 and 2020.

Research has shown that later calving cows cost more to keep and are more likely to fall foul of milk fever and other disease associated with calving.

This is mainly due to these cows being older and in too high of a body condition score (BCS) for calving.