Field Margins: Jim Baird's month at Nether Affleck

Summer doesn’t seem to have shown face at all. I had high hopes we were due an Indian summer, but as I write we have had a fortnight with belters of rain almost every second day. Fields are again sodden and my optimism that this year will sort itself out is rapidly waning. The weather forecast suggests maybe something better this coming week, so all fingers crossed.

We don’t seem to be alone though. We had a Dutch dairy farming couple staying recently and they were experiencing similar weather challenges to us. On top of that they felt really overburdened by environmental regulation and they were having to contend with Bluetongue. Maybe we should count our blessings a bit.

Teat sealant is applied to all cows with high SCCs

As an autumn block calver, these are our least exciting times on the milk cheque front. We always start August thinking that cows are milking alright, but by the end of the month milk just completely falls off a cliff. I often hear high yielders talk about the difficulty they have drying off cows giving 25 litres plus. That is not a problem we have. When our cows are ready to go dry, they are ready to go dry. They have done their bit, they are up for their holidays and we don’t grudge them it. Mature cows get a full two months off and first calvers get an extra month of R & R.

For a number of years now we have selectively dried off. Everything gets teat sealant and anything over 200 cell count gets dry cow antibiotic tubes. So far this year less than 20% have needed treating. That is probably the best we have ever achieved which is surprising as we had a difficult winter last year fighting a nasty E. coli mastitis bug. We also put teat sealant into our in-calf heifers and we feel it makes a big difference to the incidence of calving-time mastitis in them.

We are now well through drying off, only milking around 60 very stale cows at the moment. Virtually all of these will be dry by the end of September when calving gets going. To be honest, it is barely worth dirtying the parlour for the amount of milk we produce this month. Indeed, between now and when calving starts, we go down to milking once a day, and I sometimes wonder if we shouldn’t just go the whole hog and dry all the stragglers off to give ourselves a few weeks’ break from milking all together.

Despite the weather we did manage to find a window around the middle of August to tuck away fourth-cut silage. In such a catchy year we have been fortunate to make four fairly dry cuts of silage. My father-in-law used to say ‘you can’t farm on weather forecasts’, but I’m afraid that is exactly what we find ourselves doing. We all have two or three weather apps on our phones nowadays. In the run-up to silage I find myself looking at them at least half a dozen times a day.

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It doesn’t help the silage stress that weather windows are definitely getting ever narrower. A big factor in our favour, though, is the capacity and the speed of machinery nowadays. When we used to chop silage ourselves, it took us days. But we can now bargain that if everything goes to plan the contractor can chop our 100-odd acres in under five hours. It is almost embarrassing – albeit with multi-cut we are making smaller, higher-quality cuts than before.

It is going to be an expensive back end for us. As I suspected, we are going to have to go for a fifth cut of silage. We haven’t had to do that before, but then we started this season with empty silage pits, which has not been the case for a while. I would not be comfortable heading into the winter with the number of cows we have and the current fill we have in pits.

Normally we would take our fourth cut then idle towards winter housing with minimal input. This year, we will need to keep our foot on the gas and throw a bit more fertiliser at the job yet. And then we will also have the extra contractor costs of another cut.

We have also run rather short of grass at the moment – mostly weather driven but partly self-inflicted as we have pushed our luck a bit and shut up too many fields for silage. As a result, we have had to fully house around 100 nearest-to-calving dry cows. An expensive exercise we wouldn’t normally incur. Our dry-cow ration consists of a bale of straw, a bale of hay and a bale of silage. Chopped through the feeder wagon this gives a beautiful, palatable, fibrous mix that we find ideal for dry cows. However, hay and straw are not easy bought this year and we are currently feeding two mixes a day.

One upside of this year has been how few flies we have seen pestering stock. The flip side of that, however, is that all the beneficial insects seem to have taken a hammering too. There is hardly a bumble bee or a butterfly to be seen and I do wonder how the dung beetles and the soil invertebrates have fared. It has also been noticeable how few wild raspberries, brambles and even hawthorn berries there are up the hedgerows. There has just not been nature’s bounteous harvest this year. Everything has suffered from the rain and the lack of solar energy.

I have to declare: I had a milestone birthday last month. One that begins with a six, unfortunately. How did that happen? Anyway, as we had the farm reasonably tidy for the YFC stock judging, I decided to hold a party/charity barn dance. We were incredibly jammy and it landed on probably the best day’s weather of the whole year. As a result, there was very little dancing done, with everyone outside enjoying the sunshine and the crack. It was great to see everyone and thanks to their generous donations we raised a nice sum for RSABI.

We are very much in the calm before the storm at the moment. In a month’s time we will be absolutely roasted with cows calving. For now, it is a case of making sure everything is cleaned up and tuned up ready to go. That includes ourselves and, like the cows, most of us try to take this spell to have a break and recharge our batteries.

We ourselves head off shortly to see if we can find some much-needed solar energy around the Adriatic Sea. All the more important when we have had such a tough old year and especially so when we are getting to a bad age.