Herd Tasks: Your weekly farming checklist
Try to turn sucklers out to a field with a bit of shelter, particularly if young calves are heading out.
- Get your spring grazing plan in place. Have a date when you aim to complete the first round. With current growth and weather, this date will need to be a slightly moveable target for now, as you may not get out for a while yet.
- Assess silage stocks to make sure that if you don’t have grass in the diet over the coming weeks that you have sufficient fodder.
- Walk the electric fence and note repairs required - this is an exercise that can form some part of home-schooling on many farms!
- Clean out water troughs and fix any leaks.
- Bulls - get them ready for the breeding season. If you are in doubt, get them fertility tested. Some Bulls are sub-fertile but get the odd cow in calf.
- Scan autumn-calvers to see how the breeding season went.
- Plan for a fertiliser and slurry spreading programme once paddocks are grazed to optimise growth while keeping control on costs.
- Use soil test results to guide your nutrient application.
- Driving intake should be the priority to boost milk and fertility performance in fresh cows.
- Supply fresh cows with the best quality forage you have on the farm and balance with a sufficient volume of an appropriate concentrate.
- Introduce cows slowly to grass and increase allocations each day for a week before leaving them out between am and pm milking.
- Don’t forget the magnesium bucket for cows and calves when they get to grass.
- Stock up now on buckets so that you can turn them out with everything in place.
- When turning cows and calves out to grass, continue to monitor calves' suckling.
- Try to turn them out to a field with a bit of shelter, particularly if young calves are heading out.
- Begin heat detection and heat records to help identify cows not coming into heat before the spring breeding season starts.
- Continue to feed dry cows an appropriate diet and minerals. The eye can quite easily be taken off the later cows to calve.
