The 2023 spring-calving season is underway on the majority of dairy farms, which means almost round-the-clock work for farmers.
A compact calving system has a number of benefits for Irish farmers, but it also has its drawbacks – one being long working hours.
Cows are herd animals, and this means they trend to calf during the night when it is quiter and the activity levels on farms are reduced.
This unfortunately means that farmers often have to get up during the night to assist cows calving and feed newly born calves – which makes it challenging for farmers to get a good night’s sleep.
Spring calving
There are a number tools available that farmers can use to obtain those extra few hours of sleep each night.
A commonly used one is a calving camera, with a large number of dairy and suckler farmers already having one in operation.
A lot of these cameras can be accessed from smart phones which means that cows can be monitored at any time of night – without physically having to go out and check them.
To obtain the best use of these cameras, it is important that you have it correctly positioned and have sufficient lighting to allow a clear view of the calving pen or pens.
Silage feeding
Another method that can decrease the number of cows calving at night and increase day-time calvings is feeding silage to cows at night.
Research from Teagasc Moorepark has shown that restricting silage feeding-time during the day can result in less night calvings, compared to allowing cows full daily access.
In the Teagasc study, this practice reduced the number of cows calving between 12:00a.m and 6:00a.m from 25% down to 10-15%.
It is also important to note that this practice is only really suitable where adequate feeding space is provided for all cows – which is at least 0.6m/cow.