GrowthWatch: Grazing to 4cm important to maintain grass quality

By Teagasc’s Seán Cummins and James Fitzgerald

This time of year is an important time for focusing on consistently grazing down to 4cm. Most permanent pastures are beginning to produce stem and seed heads, therefore grazing down to 4cm will help to limit the proportion of stem in the sward and maintain sward quality for the next grazing.

Use the good ground conditions and subdivide fields where possible, so that fresh grass can be given to stock every two-to-three days and our 4cm residual target can be met without forcing cattle to re-graze what they have grazed already in the previous days in that paddock.

Aim to graze paddocks with 1,400kg DM/ha (9cm) of a grass cover. If the next paddock ahead of you in your rotation is gone beyond this, skip it and move onto the next paddock you come to with 1,400kg DM/ha (9cm) cover, while keeping circa 20 days grazing ahead on your farm.

Cut and bale the paddocks you skip as this will maintain grass quality for the coming weeks and provide you with some very high-quality winter feed.

Replace the nutrients taken out of the ground by the surplus bales with a light coat of slurry or a compound fertiliser such as 0-7-30 (one bag of 0-7-30 for every four bales of surplus grass removed).

Grass growth is really beginning to get going here over the last couple of weeks. I suppose the sheep were keeping the grass in check over the spring and so the growth rates weren’t that high.

Growth has passed out demand and currently I am growing 10kg DM/ha more than what’s needed for grazing. If this continues for the next couple of weeks, I will be skipping a paddock or two and baling them, but I am not doing that yet as I am currently on target with 20 days ahead.

At the moment, I am focusing on grazing down to 4cm quickly and keeping the cattle and sheep moving so that I can keep the feeding value in the grass as high as I can for as long as I can.

Having plenty of water troughs and temporary wire on-hand is allowing me to do this.

The farm grew 65kg DM/ha/day over the past seven days and demand is currently running at 59kg DM/ha/day. Some of the grazing covers are stronger than I’d like, but I will take these out with the first-cut silage in approximately 10 days.

We’re in the process of paddocking one square of ground into five, 4ac paddocks. The roadways are laid and the next job is to fence.

Hopefully this will make it easier to manage grazing groups going forward and to achieve better grass utilisation off this square.

82 units of nitrogen (N) have been applied on all of the grazing ground (one bag of urea and two bags of 18-6-12). I’m still following the cattle with 18-6-12 as some of the indexes are low for phosphorus (P) and potassium (K), but I’ll switch back to straight N as the year progresses.

70 calves have been turned out to grass over the last three weeks and a further 35 will go out in the next two weeks. The first calves turned out will receive a coccidiosis dose later this week, along with a fly treatment to help prevent them getting sore eyes.