We can already see the benefits from last week’s decision-making, along with increasing temperatures on our pasture growth rates and average pasture covers but we are not out of the woods yet.
Key Decisions:
• Implementing 10n7 has had its challenges with regard to pasture allocation and inshed feeding but the team is slowly putting systems in place and getting their head around the complexities of this milking frequency. The farm team has been basing their pasture allocation and paddock fencing on hours they are in the pdk between milkings. This is similar to what other farmers have been implementing which is a m2/hour area allocation of pasture.
• Looking forward we will be reducing the baleage fed as soon as possible, hold the kale cows on a maximum of 3.5 kg inshed/milking (we found we cannot increase over this amount due to cows being unable to eat it all in one milking due to being a PKE: Barley mix), and hold 3kg DM FB (being wary we still have new calvers entering the herds).
• As conditions on farm improve there will be a small window of opportunity to fix pugged damaged paddocks and undersow pastures that have lost density and have bare ground before weeds establish. This week the team will do a walk around each paddock and rank them based on these criteria and whether they need undersowing or just have a small area i.e. gateways and trough areas that need a rough up and hoof and tooth.
• Maintenance fertiliser applications will start in the next week
• The plan for winter 2022 is almost complete which will see us implementing a range of crop and baleage-based wintering options.
General Notes:
• We are now into single digits for cows left to calve. x3 winter dries were culled this week
• Baleage has been made from the support block and will be used to top up reserves for the farmlets. The farm team have done a stocktake on farmlet bales left and we have x27 for the Std Kale, x18 for the LI Kale, x12 for the Std FB and x9 for the LI FB
• The second mob of calves head to the support block this week
• The umbilical was used to spread effluent onto paddocks on the lower terrace. This has dropped pond capacity from 81 to 73%
• Preparation of paddocks for regrassing and winter 2022 cropping is well underway.
• Annual soil test results indicate we are making headway with improving soil fertility across the farm. Average Olsen P is slowly increasing and the range is getting tighter.
• This week is the first of our animal sampling events for the season. This will involve collecting feed, blood, urine, faeces and milk samples for N determination on Monday afternoon and Tues next week. The techs have been busy preparing for this, including labelling all the necessary containers.
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