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Top five tips for January on beef farms

Top five tips for January on beef farms

From preparing your sheds and getting ready for calving, to understanding how changes to nitrates rules impact your farm, Martina Harrington, Manager of the Teagasc Future Beef Programme, offers her top five tips for the month of January.

1. Prepare your sheds and get ready for calving

It’s the calm before the storm on many beef farms. So this is the time to take the stress out of calving and prepare.

  • Clean out any calving pens – disinfect, lime and bed;
  • Check all calving gates and internal shed gates are operating properly – it could save your life;
  • Check the calving jack, calving cameras and all lights are working in your sheds. These take time to repair;
  • Do up a shopping list for ropes, gloves, lubricants - there is a good one available on the Future Beef webpage here;
  • Check all your calving dates and calving difficulties, you don’t want any surprises.

We hope you have a very successful calving period.

2. Body Condition Score cows and pre-calving minerals

Body condition is the single biggest influence on whether your cow calves down okay and whether she goes back in calf quickly to give you another calf within the year. Key points include:

  • Run animals though the crush gently and check their condition. Without handling, over-thin or over-fat cows can often be missed;
  • Thin cows – put in with heifers or other thin cows and ensure they are on a good plane of nutrition. A 68% DMD silage offered ad-lib should be okay. If they are heifers or second calvers, you may need to add 1kg of meal and keep an eye on their condition. If you are not calving until March, you don’t want them to get over fat;
  • Fat cows – restrict slightly, the ideal time to restrict a cow is more than six weeks pre calving. However, if you have cows gaining condition, you do not want to make the situation worse. Group any fat animals together and give them the poorest-quality silage. Additionally, ensure all cows can eat, you don’t want any bullying. You need to ensure they have enough energy to calve down;
  • Ensure you are feeding 80-100 grams of a top-quality, pre-calving mineral to your cows for six weeks pre calving. This will ensure a lively calf and cow.
  • Talk to your advisor and see do you need protected minerals, for example copper. Many farmers have spread lime in the last two years after taking soil samples, or as part of scheme etc. If you are in an area where the soils are high in Molybdenum, applying lime can lock up copper, as can high Iron levels in soil.

3. Update your feed budget

2023 was one of the wettest years on record. Silage making was restricted and this teamed with early housing may have many farmers running tight. If you know early you can react. By now, you know what your stock are eating per day, so try and project forward. If you are short you still have options:

  • Plan to get some stock out to grass as soon as conditions allow;
  • Buy silage - if you can source it;
  • Build finishing cattle onto ad-lib meal and remove forage. Talk to an advisor, if you have not fed animals ad-lib before;
  • Buy in beet and dilute your silage;
  • Sell stock – the price in marts is good at present.

4. Know the nitrates rules and do a Nutrient Management Plan

Spreading dates

Know the 2024 spreading dates for fertiliser, slurry (organic) and farmyard manure. The date below is the end date, so the 27th of January is the first day you can apply chemical fertiliser, the 13th of January is the first day you can apply slurry and Farmyard manure in Zone A.

Figure 1: Map of zones

Map of slurry spreading zones

Figure 2: Prohibited spreading periods

Details of prohibited spreading dates

Spreading method

In 2024, all farmers with a grassland stocking rate of above 130kgs N/ha must apply their slurry using a dribble bar or trailing shoe.

The important thing to remember here is all organic nitrogen produced on your farm is divided by the grassland area only, you have to exclude all tillage areas.

How much fertiliser am I allowed?

Ideally, every farmer should have soil tests for their farm. This allows you to apply the nutrients on your farm where they are most required and where they will give you most bang for your buck.

That being said, from a Nitrates point of view, all farms with a stocking Rate >130 kg/ha this year must have soil samples if they want to buy chemical phosphorous or import slurry. These soil samples are then put into a Nutrient Management Plan and this will let you know exactly how much you can purchase/import.

If you are only purchasing straight nitrogen you do not need to have soil samples.

You must have one soil sample per 5ha (12 acres) maximum. Soil samples have to be taken every four years, therefore, soil samples analysed since 15/09/2020 are valid for 2024.

To add confusion - for farmers in ACRES - the samples have to have been taken since 01/01/2022, to be eligible for ACRES plans.

Remember in 2024, all farmers are signed up to the National Fertiliser Database for chemical fertiliser. All your purchases are recorded here and available to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

Buffer strips

Do not spread chemical fertiliser within 3m of any surface water. Slurry/FYM cannot be spread within 5m of any surface water. This extends to 10m if there is a slope greater than 10%, or in the two weeks before and after the closed periods.

buffer zones

Farmers with a tillage operation also need to be aware of the tillage buffer zones for surface water:

 

  • 3m uncultivated, unsprayed and unfertilised;
  • 3m around all catch crop boundaries;
  • 4m for forage crops grazed in-situ;
  • 5m for organic manure applications;
    • Only LESS allowed, unless organic manure is incorporated before 24 hours;
  • 6m uncultivated for late-harvest crops that intersect.

5. Get back to grass as soon as possible

At the time of writing, we are enjoying the first dry spell of weather we have had since June 2023. My thoughts go back to February 2023, the driest February on record and the thoughts of many farmers last spring that they wasted the opportunity to get out and get grass grazed and silage saved.

Have a walk around your farm, see what grass you have on the farm and what the soil conditions are like, you may be surprised.

Look at the lightest stock on the farm, probably weanlings, and plan on letting out a proportion of them. You may not let them out, but you should have a few fields prepared that if you wanted to and the conditions stayed right that you could.

Pick the driest field closest to the yard, or with road access back to the yard. Aim for grazing ground first, to allow it time to grow back for the second round of grazing, and then graze silage ground.

Martina Harrington is the Manager of the Teagasc Future Beef Programme. For more information on this programme, including its aims and the farmers enrolled, click here.