We are happy to announce that our last cow calved today! This is good timing while we balance time off for staff before mating commences. Decisions this week have been around how to increase the quality of pasture and what to do with paddocks that did not hit residuals in previous rounds due to trying to protect them from pugging damage.
Key Decisions:
• The low-quality pasture base in some of these paddocks will be topped post-grazing to reset residuals and ensure high-quality regrowth, especially as some seed head is already appearing.
• With growth rates at or near demand we have flagged some paddocks that could be shut up for silage if cows struggle to hit residuals.
• We are reducing our use of supplements right back and speeding up to a 25-day rotation.
• We continue to keep some FB in the system to prevent it from being wasted but need to decide over the next week whether to sell the rest of the surplus.
• We are cutting silage at the support block again this week.
• With mating fast approaching we will finalise our plan over the next week and decide which cows need intervention. One decision is that the upper quadrant of larger Friesian-dominant cows will get straight jersey semen to try to reduce the size of their offspring.
• Our heat detection technique in the past has been tail paint and heat patches but now that we have the Allflex collar technology we will use tail paint and the collar data produced. The team has trained today around how to get the shed to automatically draft out cows that the collars indicate are cycling.
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