Description

Practice abstract

The focus of autumn grazing management in an Irish pasture-based system is to increase the number of days at grass and improve animal performance, but also to set the farm up during the final rotation to grow grass over winter and provide grass the following spring. Generally, rotation length should be extended from 10 August. The focus of this period is to gradually build pre-grazing covers, targeting covers of 2,000kg to 2,200kg DM/ha in mid-September.  

Mike Bermingham farms in partnership with his wife Tina and daughters Sarah and Kayleigh near Fermoy Co. Cork. The Berminghams farm a 40ha platform with a spring calving dairy herd milking twice a day. The grazing season on the farm is approximately 280 days of the year, and they work hard to get cows to grass in the challenging weather in spring and autumn.  In autumn to lengthen the grazing season, from August the round is lengthened by 2 days a week to increase the pre-grazing yield. Excess stock is also removed from the platform. This helps to reduce the demand on the block and give the cows more days at grass. Mike puts up a 12 hours strip wire in between milkings to allocate cows grass and ensure the post grazing sward height is 3.5cm to allow a clean base in the sward over the year. Mike finds ensuring there is grass in the diet in autumn reduces labour on the farm as they don’t have to feed out silage or lime and scrape cubicles.  

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