Field margins: Jim Baird shares his grass management plan

That said, it has been far from a bundle of laughs trying to graze dairy cows at times these last couple of months.

We rotationally graze, so it is all about measuring grass weekly with a platemeter, each milking giving cows a fresh allocation of grass.

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Grazing cows on a rotational system has not been the easiest this year following such a wet spring

The plan is for cows to go into fields at around 10cm grass height (3000kgs of dry matter per hectare), and within two days graze down to a low 4cm residual (1500kgs dm/ha). Ideally, we would have a wedge of fields all at different stages and move cows around in roughly a three-week cycle. Unfortunately, ‘ideally’ has gone completely out of the window so far this year.

Problems started at turnout, or lack of turnout I should say. To get fields into the aforementioned wedge, we need to get cows out as early as possible, hopefully around April 1. That can sometimes be before it looks sensible to do so, and I am sure at times some have thought we are definitely April fools. However, I have never reached the end of the first grazing round and thought we had turned out too early – usually the opposite.

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With the mild winter and the amount of early grass we had, turnout should have been even earlier this year. However, ground conditions were far from favourable and I was quite determined I didn’t want to trash fields on the first round.

In early April, we had a discussion group of spring-calving farmers visit us. They stood looking at our grass and shook their heads at my timidness. In hindsight they were maybe right, because by mid-April, when we eventually did brave turnout, the grass was way ahead of us, ground conditions were still not great, and we ended up damaging fields anyway.

Electric reel slaves

While it is great to see cows going to grass and getting a break from concrete, and us some respite from the winter routine, it doesn’t necessarily make things easier from a management perspective. We have to make decisions on grass allocation on a twice-daily basis. We become slaves to an electric reel, and a fair bit of time and welly rubber goes into moving fences. When the sun shines it is a pleasure, but when you face the kind of weather challenges that we have this year, well, I can certainly see why many keep their cows in the house.

Flexibility has had to be the name of the game this year. Our policy is to alternate our grazing and cutting fields year about. That, however, meant grazing the softer end of the farm this year. We did start in that direction, then rapidly retreated to grazing the driest fields we had, and those with the best track infrastructure to try to minimise poaching damage. We have managed to graze grass every day, but at times cows have been out for a few hours to fill up, then back into the house to get hooves off the land.

The type of cows we have bred are trained to be aggressive grass eaters. Because they are all in later lactation, we can ask them to work quite hard to achieve low residual covers. There is always a fine balance to be struck between filling cows up with grass and making sure they tidy up fields properly. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we have a field of unhappy cows. In wet conditions it is much easier to have the latter.

Unhappy cows = unhappy farmer. That balance becomes even more difficult with the high covers of grass we have been asking them to tidy up at times this year. In dry spells, we can just about get away with that, but when it is wet, as it has often been, we have no chance.

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Discontented bunch

Cows on a rotational grazing system are a naturally more discontented bunch. The grass literally is always greener over the fence, and they are always looking for the next fresh bite. It sometimes feels like a battle of wills between the cows and myself.

Occasionally they do get the upper hand, and it is never a good start to the morning when you go out to fetch them in and they have broken through the fence during the night. That’s when very happy cows = very unhappy farmer.

Because we have struggled to make a good job of grazing, the quality has gone out of the grass in some fields. The only way to rectify that is with a mower.

Around 30 acres of the initial grazing platform will now end up in the silage pit, and has been replaced with some nice tasty after-cuts. Hopefully that will go some way to resetting our wedge, and it certainly put a smile back on cows’ faces again.

We have also been doing a bit of pre-mowing and post-mowing. If the weather is good, pre-mowing a day’s worth of grass before the cows go into the paddock can work really well. Cows can consume a tremendous amount of grass and it is amazing how they can tidy things up. It just does not work, though, if things are wet, and that is when we would tend to post-mow straight behind the cows. The purists might frown, but I would rather feed headed or spoiled grass back to the soil biology than have it affecting cow consumption next time round.

Ayr Show

We did get one decent spell of sunshine when we really needed it, and we managed to get first-cut silage chopped on May 11 – the day of Ayr Show. It won’t be the biggest bulk, or I suspect the most nutritious we’ll ever have made, but it was made in perfect weather conditions and it was great to get it tucked away nicely.

Considering how sticky things have been, I was pleasantly surprised at how little damage we did to fields in the process. Machines are getting bigger and faster and heavier all the time, and there is no doubt we are putting more pressure on soils.

Fortunately, we had a few good dry days after silage and were able to get some aerating rolling done, and get fertiliser and slurry on in good order. Second-cut growth has got off to a good start, but recently fields look a bit stressed and I would say quality looks like it is declining quicker than bulk is improving. I think we will be cutting again by the time you read this article. It might need to be a five-cut silage year this year.

Because of the exceptionally wet spring, some fields didn’t receive any artificial fertiliser at all before first cut. That has never happened before. It was a bit of an eye-opener but as long as fields had received a good application of slurry, there was no discernible yield reduction as a result. We have continually been chipping away at our fertiliser applications in recent years, to the extent that one load of urea now does us for the whole year. This year’s experience might suggest we have scope to push that even further yet?

Slurry storage

We are certainly not short of slurry to work with. In recent times we have typically been just a bit tight on slurry storage. So last year we invested in an additional 500,000 gallons of slurry capacity. We thought that would give us plenty breathing space for future growth if needed. To our dismay, we ended up almost completely full to capacity by the time we had an opportunity to spread any on the land. Thank goodness we made that investment or we would have been in a right old pickle.

I suspect I haven’t done much in this article to sell rotational grazing. If it was easy everyone would be doing it, and I know many think life is too short to measure grass.

The bottom line is that we find we grow a lot more grass on this system. In a normal year, we also harvest that grass at the optimum time for the cow, and for the grass plant itself. We feel more in control and have more management levers to pull, whatever variables the weather throws at us. Ultimately, more grass, utilised better, is what drives our bottom line.