The blink and you’ll miss it summer continues. Apart from the occasional downpour, it’s not been overly wet, but there haven’t been any real periods when we’ve had a couple of days of warm sunshine.
This has had an effect on grass growth as the silage crops have not been as large as previous years, although thankfully we had quite a lot of material carried over so the pits are looking reasonably stocked. I guess lack of quantity wouldn’t be a huge issue if the quality was fantastic.
But the only analysis we’ve had back so far is the first cut which isn’t quite as good as last year with an ME of 11.1 (vs 11.5 in 2023), protein 15.9% (16.4%) and sugars 0.9% (2.3%) – although the intake figure is slightly higher at 114 (102). That said, the only analysis that really counts is in the cows’ rumens and they don’t seem to be complaining, with milk yields as high as they’ve ever been and over 44 litres per cow going into the tanker each day.
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It’s not just ‘white water’ either with 3.77%BF and 3.36%P converting through to 3.25kg of milk solids per cow/day. It does make me wonder what they might achieve if they were on a VMS (robot) system.
While grass seems to be a bit back, cereals have been doing not too badly. That is until the heavy rain at the start of the week took its toll on the winter wheat. We took some winter barley and winter wheat as wholecrop, both of which seemed like reasonable crops. We also combined some of the winter barley getting around 3t/acre at 19% moisture, and although the weather was quite catchy we managed to get the straw in reasonable condition.
The field beans are also looking pretty good with the plants up to around 5-6ft tall. One of the cows broke into the field the other week and you could barely see the top of her back. Thankfully, she kept to the tramlines and didn’t do too much damage! Hopefully the plants haven’t used all their energy growing tall and still have plenty left to fill the pods.
Elsewhere on the cattle front the TB cloud once again hangs over us with the neighbouring herd suffering another breakdown, having only just gone clear earlier in the year. Once more the APHA wants us to put our cows through the ordeal of a skin test for the third time in 18 months. So, we are left to carry the cost of staffing to get the testing done as well as potential abortions, missed heats, and milk loss because APHA was too quick to release restrictions next door. When you have a large lagoon full of slurry from infected cows, it is crazy to discount the risk that you’ll get further infections once it gets spread.
Thankfully, we’ve made sure that we’ve never had cattle in fields on that boundary, and even if we had there are 1.5m stand-off fences to prevent nose-to-nose contact. We’ve been a closed herd for more than 30 years and don’t even winter in sheep because of the biosecurity risk so if, God forbid, we do have any reactors the only likely route will be via wildlife and that is not a happy thought.
Combined with the anecdotal stories I’ve heard regarding TB elsewhere in south-west Scotland, I do worry that the Scottish Government really isn’t doing enough to make sure the country gets to maintain its OTF status. Which is particularly galling as at least twice last year I heard presentations about TB in Scotland which basically said ‘don’t worry, we’ve had a bit of a blip in cases but it’s all under control’.
On a more positive slant on cow health, a couple of people have asked me about the yeast boluses I mentioned in my last article. The ones we use are the RY Caps from TechMix which you can get via World Wide Sires. We use them regularly when cows are showing decreased rumination on their Smaxtec boluses and usually see a rapid improvement. In more pronounced cases we’ll normally also give fluids with a Pro-Rumen sachet and propylene glycol.
The graph attached is from a cow that unfortunately aborted twins at the end of last week. The green line shows her rumination which starts to deteriorate as she wasn’t feeling much like eating. The blue line shows her rumen temp and you can actually see the downwards blip where we gave her fluids at 9am on August 4, with the rumination improving rapidly thereafter. She is quite an old cow so I think it will take her a while to fully recover but it’s good to have her heading in the right direction now!
Also heading in the right direction is the milk price which, bit by bit, is heading north of 40p ‘helped’ by the weather constraining production across the UK. That said, we’re still quite conscious of trying to keep our costs down, so we were a bit taken back when we discovered that we could save 33% on our milk recording costs by switching company.
I’ll not say where we moved from but I’d definitely recommend people having a look as I was surprised how big the price differential was.
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