I have completed in grass walk since the last article.
The weather has been very poor, and cows have been housed since the last article.
I have been milking once a day since November 12.
Cows are milking around 13 litres at the moment. Butterfat is at 5.85% and protein is at 4.17%.
Somatic cell count is holding around 140,000, while cows are getting 4kg of concentrate in the parlour.
The diet for this week is grass by day and bales of silage by night.
The cows came in by night on Thursday, October 30.
The weather was just breaking around then, and I made the decision to bring them in before they started causing wreck.
I had hoped to keep them out by day, but the weather broke, and I had to house them full-time since November 3.
Their first day back out at grass is today Tuesday, November 18.
I hope to keep them out by day for the rest of the week.
I just want to graze off two paddocks that have gone a bit strong.
I will have them housed full-time again from the weekend onwards.
Milk price isn’t looking great for next year so I am hoping to have as much grass as possible in the spring to try and keep costs down.
I hope this will set myself up best for the spring but we never know what way the weather might go.
I have around 25% of the herd dried off.
They are mostly first calvers or any cow that had a high cell count during the year.
I have found that when milking once a day, any cow that has a high cell count will drive the cell count ridiculously high.
This is why I pull them out and give them a longer dry cow period.
I have picked out 20 cows for selective dry cow treatment.
I use ICBF to pick out suitable cows for selective dry cow treatment.
My criteria for selective dry cow therapy (SDCT) is no cow can go over 100,000 cell count from the seen milk recordings I complete in the year, and these cows can not have any case of mastitis either.
This is our fifth year working with SDCT. I haven’t seen any issues.
The rest of the herd will either get short-acting antibiotics of long-acting antibiotics, depending on their cell count during the year. These cows will receive a teat sealer along with the antibiotics.
For any farmer thinking of trying SDCT, I would say you will definitely need enough cubicles for all the cows.
I continue to lime the cubicles twice a day even though I am only milking once a day.
I find it a good practice to keep them as clean as possible.
I don’t teat seal the heifers. There is enough cubicles for them and I don’t have any major issues when they calf down.
The heifers came home on the 1st of November, and they have been inside full time since.
I had hoped to leave them out for a while, but the weather wasn’t fit to leave them out.
My discussion group went on a trip to Johnstown Castle to see the latest research down there.
We had a very informative day and got to see their latest research on winter milk, multi-species swards and soil fertility.
