Most livestock farmers – and dairy farmers in particular – are obsessed with grass growth.
It can be subconscious, but all the time you are mentally assessing how much grass you’ve got – how much grass is available for the cows tomorrow? How much is available for next week? And just as importantly, how much is present to cut for silage.
Second in importance, how much grass has everyone else got? Is mine growing better? Most of the close shaves I’ve had driving have occurred when I’ve been looking over the hedges at other farmers’ grass when I should have been looking at the road.
On a plate (meter)
Like most things in life, assessing grass growth is more sophisticated than it was when I was a young man.
My son walks the grass fields once a week with what he calls a plate meter. This device tells him exactly how much grass he has in kilograms – and as he knows just how much he needs, he knows how much area to give them every day.
He also knows how much to give to leave the right amount of stubble for optimum regrowth.
I don’t know why I am telling you all this, because I don’t know how to use a plate meter. I think an app on his mobile phone has a part to play in his calculations – I’m not really sure what an app is.
I’m not a dinosaur with regards to grass growth. I remember putting in cow tracks and paddocks nearly 30 years ago. Farming always goes in circles, so perhaps I was ahead of my time.
It’s just a bit annoying when younger people tell me they have put in cow tracks as if they invented the concept – but I don’t tell them that.
I didn’t have the modern help of a plate meter, but I did have indicators. If the grass was up to a corgi’s shoulders it was perfect for grazing, but if you couldn’t see a cock pheasant in there it had probably gone too far and needed cutting.
A lot of judgement and “eye” was probably involved, but the irony is that I used to get similar results to those they achieve today with more sophisticated means.
Sheep tracks
Animals can tell you a lot. I remember reading about a multimillionaire who had bought a vast estate in the Highlands of Scotland. His first project was to improve communications and accessibility, so he decided to install a network of stone tracks and roadways.
He engaged a team of surveyors to lay out just where these roadways should go. He knew where they were to go to, and their instructions were to follow contour lines and avoid steep gradients where possible.
Mid-afternoon, he went to see how they were getting on. He was a very shrewd man – his new compatriots would probably have called him canny – and he spotted immediately that where the surveyors had pegged out a roadway thus far, a sheep track was already following the same route. He sent the surveyors packing.
After that, he decided where he wanted to get to on the estate and built new roads in places where a convenient sheep track existed.
When I used to keep sheep, I always judged how much grass I had by describing it as “picking” – how much “picking” have they got?
Sheep have very different grazing requirements to dairy cows. If a cow doesn’t have enough grass, she tells you by how much milk is in the tank the next day. If a sheep doesn’t have enough grass, it breaks out until it finds some.
Eking it out
I can’t remember a time when the Middle East was not in the news. I used to look at newsreel footage of dry, arid landscapes with my dairy farmer’s eyes and wonder: “How do they get a living out of that?”
The answer is that they couldn’t – but their sheep and goats could. Their sheep are closer to resembling goats than any sheep you will see around here.
The sheep and goats eked out a living on the sparse vegetation, then their owners ate the sheep and goats or lived on the cheese and milk they produced. That’s how man became an omnivore.
Vegans couldn’t sustain themselves if they tried to eat the grass that grows on the upland pastures of mid-Wales, but sheep can – and you can eat those sheep.
In time, a small number of people will be growing old who have only eaten a vegetable diet. Who knows what health problems they are storing up for themselves in their futures?
Sexed semen
At the time of writing, we’ve had a lot of cows dry lately and they are just starting to calve.
Inadvertently, we are predominantly a spring calving herd. We didn’t seek to be spring milk producers and our milk buyer would prefer more milk in the autumn, but our cow numbers were allowed to drop when we converted to organic and we couldn’t put the numbers back up when we wanted because we were closed down with TB.
We’ve been clear of TB for some time, but its impact lives on and still has a negative effect financially.
We have used a lot of sexed semen to get these cows in calf. Our aim is to reduce the number of dairy bulls that are born.
The plight – and it is a plight – of some dairy bulls is a stigma on the dairy industry. A stigma that is growing. Too many dairy bull calves are euthanised on farm and eventually it will be brought to an end.
Euthanasia
We’ve never euthanised calves, but I remember once, when we were closed down with TB and were inundated with calves, that I took some to a TB-restricted market.
Half the calves made less than £10 – so no prizes for guessing where they ended up within 24 hours. I don’t kid myself with what happened to them.
Perhaps euthanasia on farm is not so bad after all – perhaps these calves would have been better off if they hadn’t had the trauma of being pushed through a market.
It’s the perception that is so bad – it’s all driven by money. If an animal is worthless, a fair chance exists that it will have a hard time. You only have to look as what happens to some horses to seek further proof.
By using sexed semen, we are keeping (hopefully) these dairy bull calves to a minimum. The balance of our cows are in calf to a beef bull and should be of some value.
from Vet Times
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