Robin Talbot: What key decisions we’re making on the farm now for next year and beyond

Luckily, we are now down to small numbers. We actually left those who are still to calve in the shed for a few days and nights when there was a lot of rain falling.

A few of them calved on the slats but, since all our slats are covered with rubber mats, there was no issue.

Goldilocks

We are down to a trickle on the calving front and, because we always remove the stock bulls by a certain date, they will all have to be calved within the next few weeks.

We are culling the cows quite hard this year. This is for a number of reasons.

A few cows are persistently lame. But the main reason is to do with the level of mastitis that we have had this calving season.

Luckily enough, it was almost totally confined to the older cows, which were probably soon up to their time anyway.

Early in the year, we also decided to cull the ten poorest performing cows on the basis of our ICBF Eurostar report.

I am concerned that this could leave us slightly down on cow numbers for next year.

That in itself is not an issue, but I don’t want to get caught short if some as-yet-unknown scheme that depends on historical cow numbers were to come on-stream. I am hoping that, by culling hard, we will have a young fresh herd of cows, plus mature well-grown heifers going for breeding, whereby, if we can lift the conception rates by a couple of percent, the effect of any reduction in numbers should be negligible.

As for vaccinating the calves, we are nearly in a situation like Goldilocks and the Three Bears — first, it was too hot, then it was too wet and, now, we are looking at them and saying they are too strong.

Nonetheless, we will have to get stuck into it this week.

They will be getting live IBR vaccine inter-nasally. They will also get their first shot of Bovipast.

They will get their second Bovipast shot a month later. This should leave them well covered coming into the shed. When the calves are getting their first shot of Bovipast, we also give the cows a booster for Lepto.

Not to forget the stock bulls, as they are heading towards the breeding season, we checked them over last week, and they all look good to go.

Once the weather broke, we spread some Nitrogen. There must have been a certain amount of residual fertiliser available to the grass because of the way that it responded to the easing of the moisture deficit.

But there was a section of the grazing ground that we still decided to spread fertiliser on because we were conscious of the need to build up covers of grass for the breeding season, so as not to start the winter too early.

We had planned to reseed a stubble field this autumn. By the time this article is read, we will have made the decision to go ahead and sow, or wait until the spring.

This field is named The Quarry. That will give an idea of just how dry the soil had become.

We had everything ready to go — seed in the shed, stones picked, soil sample taken and P&K applied accordingly. But we were waiting for some bit of rain to come.

I was apprehensive about sowing the seed before a change in the weather, because of past experience.

One time, we sowed grass seed in a dry spell in a field with a slight slope, like The Quarry.

When the weather broke, it was with a torrential downpour, which washed a lot of the seed and some of the soil, down the slope and out the gate.

When the grass established , there were several bare patches, so we had to go and reseed again the following year. Now that the weather has broken, I am no longer worried about the grass seed getting established.

My concern now is, as the year moves on, the window for spraying new grass for weeds gets smaller.

Also, the chances are that we won’t get to graze it. The problem is that we would end up carrying too heavy a cover over the winter which would, more than likely, take out most of the clover.

If we don’t get to sow it now, we will sow it as early as possible in the spring.

All the stubble ground has been disced, and is ready for ploughing.

We soil-sampled all the tillage fields, and await results.

It’s always interesting to compare them to the previous ones which were taken three years ago.

We also have our oilseed rape sowed. Conditions were ideal and it was up in a few days. Hopefully it works out as well as this year’s crop.

Finally, we look forward to going to The Ploughing. I’ve missed it!

Robin Talbot farms in Ballacolla, Co Laois, in partnership with his mother Pam and wife Ann