Signpost: The priority right now is to get fertiliser onto silage ground

It’s important that I secure my winter feed for next year, so I can’t afford to skimp on this writes @TeagascSignpost farmer Joe Carroll

Joe Carroll, Rathmorrell, Causeway pictured on his farm outside Ballyheigue in County Kerry.

After a very slow start to the grazing season, I managed to get two grazings a day all through since the end of February.

I have 60% of the farm grazed now with an average farm cover of 870kg/DM/ha. I plan to finish the 1st round between April 10 and 15. It’s later than I would like but it could be worse if I hadn’t managed it over the last month. I started the evening milkings earlier to allow me to get the second grazing in and practised on-off grazing where I needed to.

The priority right now is to get fertiliser onto silage ground. Fertiliser is expensive this year but it’s important that I secure my winter feed for next year so I can’t afford to skimp on this. I have already applied 60 units of Nitrogen to the silage ground but will apply another 20 units plus 15 units of sulphur in the next few days. It’s old ground so I wouldn’t get a response from applying more. I don’t have slurry to go on it but will top up with two and a half bags per acre of 0:7:30. I will also apply 100kg/acre of granular lime on the silage ground.

On the milking platform, I am applying slurry at 2,000 gals per acre using the trailing shoe after grazing, this is giving half the annual P maintenance requirement and most of the K requirement for the year on the grazing ground. I am following that with 30 units of N within 10 days to bring the application of N in the current round up to about 45 units which I will need at my stocking rate.

I am planning on doing some oversowing of clover in the next few weeks. I did an area last year, but it didn’t work out too well and the clover content is poor. I reckon it was because of the very dry weather that can afterwards. I will do things differently this year — I will oversow earlier, I will work harder to graze low covers and I will cut back on the N.

It’s hard to do that when I am heavily stocked, but I need to trust that the clover will deliver. 

Picking paddocks for oversowing is easy this year — it’s paddocks that were reseeded last year with no clover included because I didn’t have a clover safe spray available to me. What’s important to me when selecting paddocks for oversowing is paddocks that have good soil fertility so I need a soil pH of 6.5 and index 3s for P & K. 

Paddocks that have no weeds in them and open swards will make it easier to establish.

I will also be reseeding a poor performing paddock it grew 12 tonnes versus the farm average of 14 tonnes last year and it is always a little harder to keep the quality in it. I plan to use Abergain and Aberchoice as well as a medium-size white clover variety. In the past, I have disced and power harrowed but this year I will power harrow only. It saves time and my fields are reasonably level so less of an issue.

Farm walk

I have a farm walk on April 13 at 11am (all welcome). 

Topics include breeding and grassland. In preparation for that, I am weighing the heifers. I am happy with them as they came into the sheds last autumn in good shape and were turned out last week. In weighing them I will use the heifer maintenance figure to estimate what weight they should be. 

The EBI maintenance figure for the heifers is €19, therefore, they should be 299kg on April 1, and 326 kg at pre-breeding. It will be interesting to see if they are all on target weights, but if not I will still have some time to take action on any light ones.