Farmer Focus: Storm Babet wrecks final grazing rotation
© Cathal Noonan A problem shared is a problem halved, and we could rightly do without half of the weather that is being thrown at us at the moment. A whopping 110mm of rain fell over a 36-hour period during Storm Babet.
We have experienced similar levels of rainfall in the past, but the intensity and manner in which it fell were what caused all the damage.
It didn’t take much for the already saturated landscape to brim and overflow, and the unrelenting torrents that followed led to huge volumes of overland flow.
See also: Tips for an end-of-season grazing platform review
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The river Colligan, running at the end of our hilly farm, rose more than 5ft, with large trees washed downstream like matchsticks.
And our streams became completely overburdened, extending beyond the banks and across the fields, carrying sand, silt and stones in their wake.
This is not conducive to good grazing management in the final rotation, to say the least. The dry matter of grass has become the equivalent of a green smoothie, like you would get at a juice bar.
Cows have found it next to impossible to get the feed value from grazed grass despite supplementation, and production has taken a knock.
Cows are producing about 1.07kg milk solids a cow this week, with baled silage fed at night and 2kg of concentrate provided in the parlour.
In our area, milk collections are well back on previous years and grass in the diet lasting until the end of November is looking less likely.
We temporarily housed our in-calf heifers on the day of the storm, and the downpours since means they’re still inside.
Dropping off the empty cull cows to the mart this morning, the tractor met with a traffic jam of competing trailers, equally full with the offloads of the dairy herd, as grass becomes scarce and the weather more challenging.
Cull cow prices were shy of €1/kg (87p/kg) for those that were straight out of the parlour – so not much to celebrate there either.
On the plus side – a very small plus – our milk price from Tírlan held for the month of September, at 33.08c/litre (29p/litre).
This equates to a milk price of more than 47c/litre (41p/litre) for our once-a-day milk, delivering butterfat of 5.88% and protein of 4.46%.