You are certainty correct about the weather. Our cows have gone up 3 litres just because of dry weather, the same buffer fed silage, and strip grazing the same field. I've also got some 10.4 ME silage, which was our second part of the first cut, I should have cut the lot early, but I thought that I would give it another week and It came a monsoon and couldn't get it cut for an extra 10 days longer. So that wet spell in May will have an impact on 3-4 months of winter milk production for us, too.
Great content Andrew, you could try this time of year before a wet day pre mow ahead of the cows give them a section as you normally do....if grass is good quality they should eat it quickly and take them off immediately when grass is eaten..it should stop them ploughing around.. i premow myself regularly instead of topping works well hope this helps or might be a good or bad experiment 🤔 😅
Appreciating the reassurance that its OK to have to pick from only bad options this year! Spreading lime but still compacting in July what's that about!!!
Great Video Andrew, Climate is always the major variable in farming! I understand you attempt to do the best you can! But sometimes you have no option that is perfect, in fact often no satisfactory options and that is why a Farm Managers job is very challenging, given the amount of regrassing you are doing have you considered cropping some of the more remote paddocks? Are Fodder Beet, and whole crop grain silage possible choices? thanks for sharing
Great video. Brilliant explanation of the bad quality silage on the out farm… from what you said I would have judged it to be good silage on first principles without getting the details ref compaction & old lea etc. Interesting that you can relate DM to rainfall and £ earnings on a daily, weekly & monthly basis… while the weather is bad & you’re decision making is constrained at least you know what’s going on real time. Keep up the good work.
Andrew I occasionally watch your videos from the grain growing area in Western Australia Goomalling Near Dowering We are having our big field days Show on at the end of August worth a look My history started off as a farmer in the South Laois and dairy farming pre quota 40 years ago or thereabouts Yes I know your part of the country as I bought a combine harvester out of Omagh many years ago I think you need to make your videos a bit more entertaining Bit like Farmer Phil ,as you tube has got so competitive for viewers it takes a special to get the numbers I first got into following Y T many years ago when it first started , got tired of the amount of nonsense that was on it, started following some of the Americans Millennial Farmer, Armless farmer , Mike Mitchell + a few. More As at that time most of the Irish were videos and Music and the young Farmer Phil ‘ Finnigans Farm yourself came along My opinion of Irish Dairy farming is that for the owners comfort there needs to be a reassessment on running the maximum numbers ,and that is going on my N Z Experience of near 50 years ago, actually 49 years ago today Aug 16th Two other chaps and I landed in NZ to work for a year on Dairy farms,sent by Macra Na Feirma with the aim of coming back to Ireland to push dairying forward , Looks like it worked. One of my experiences there was that I was working as a manager on a 200 Cow dairy farm on the Huraki plains flat country The lad who was there helping me , a Doctors son from Auckland can you imagine that happening in Ireland in the seventies?? Anyway one of my observations was that I found that most of the farmers were getting burned out physically etc in their mid 40 ties This young actually wanted him and I to take on a share milking contract together I didn’t Went back to my 30 cows in Ireland didn’t quite work out after some years headed for Australia did a bit of work on farming and after a while went towards the mining industry that’s where the $$$ were and never looked back Like your videos but I feel that watching from out. Ireland we need a bit more entertaining
maybe give the cows some umbrellas 🙂. More great information. As a non farmer i could guess why you might umbilical rather than a tank would be good to know if im correct.
I see commodity prices for maze grain (corn) and cattle here in the US are way down this week, one guy saying his 1yo steers are down $160 per head just this week,
@@FarmTheoryNI imho, the projections for this years crop yield are pretty high, A general feeling that there is an economic slowdown down about to happen, And the very high prices were unsustainable.
Zero grazer lad yup I was sceptical at first but my son went and bought a secondhand one for small money back in 18 and 6 years later we are on our second one and it’s a game changer. We keep the cows in every night and if the weather is poor , in reality dry matter doesn’t really affect the cows as much because we can get far more input from zero grazed grass ( don’t ask me why but cows eat more grass if you put it in front of them rather than letting them cut it themselves) also you get far better grass utilisation.
We farm in Belgium, and farm 70% gras and 30% mais, this year we started with zero grazing to try and feed more grass to the cows. After 4 months we found out that the cows produce 3to5 liters less then in winter. But now we can feed mutch cheaper with omost no protein additive. Also we didn't buy byproducts (brewers grain or dry distillers grain). With this milkprice i think it's more intteresting to feed hard then to feed cheap. There is also a big difference in grassfields (old pastures or reseeded fresh fields). Now we had 10 days no rain and today 35degree tempreture so zero grazing will be on the way back if rain doesn't come next days (sorry for my bad english).
@@boerstevenvdv The English is considerably better than my Dutch, I 100percent agree with you regarding old grass versus new seeds , zero grazing is far more beneficial with new grass and it is all about reducing costs we feed grass and 3 kilos of a 15 percent dairy ration and are producing 1.87 kilos of milk solids per head from cows 176 days calved on average. Our cost of production has plummeted since we started using the zero grazer , in fairness our level of production has dropped but the bottom line ( profit) has increased significantly.
Don't be too sore on yourself over "bad decisions' Andrew. Like everyone else you plan for things to go well. Things won't look so bad when you look back over the entire year
If I was in your shoes I would talk to my ration supplier for a high energy dairy nut with max protein of 14%. Your cows are crying out for more energy. You know that yourself!
I am on a 20% protein high fibre nut. Your spot on I should switch but things have already changed and we are back up to 23l today. The high fibre is to drive intakes of what should be good grazed grass.
Fantastic silage will never beat grass no matter how good it is on paper. We have seen it and tested it here with zero grazing. The extra litres produced at night from zero graze grass over the best silage is ridiculous.
If you feed enough meal it should keep milk up. And cover for the grass situation. I think your meal isnt good enough. Iv seen before how things change by changing meal. You could feed maze meal on top of the silage. Its not too expensive to buy. Their was a great dairy man near me here. He is dead now. He had 300 dairy cows in the 1990s. Which was a lot here then. I heard him say 1nc. That he was over in Holland years before and it amazed him how much they wer getting out of basically the same cows. He said if you put the right ingredients into your cow its amazing what she can produce. With silage going to be tight and quality down on both silage and grass. Meal is your best bet. Straight grains are cheapish. A ton of straw at moment is more than a ton of barley.
Also I see up until this week people here in the US were paying $600 to $900 a head for 10 day old Holstein angus cross calves, How does that compare to NI at the moment?
Drone shots are great Andrew 👍.On weather etc ,you know very well that it’s lack of quality sunshine this year for most of your problems especially after a very wet start ,trying to get lamb/beef/milk from grass is always a challenge the best of times .Think positive ,life can be a bitch sometimes !
I watch u from NY Andrew I’m here 30 years from a farm in Antrim but coming home for good in new year I’m a contractor here an bringing few machines back with me when I do I’ll offer u some help on farm u don’t need pay me I’ve made my money maybe we can get u some drainage in u cover the diesel ok anyway maybe I’ll see u in future I love the channel u do know what your on about
Have you done the maths on the profitability on housing the cows? Are you confident when you say that you'd make more money? I'm in the south, I can not see any way here that housing full time would be profitable as costs would be so high. In what way is it different up there?
@@adriant900 was thinking same thing even if they lose milk outside what milk they do have at least has some margin. No wonder there's not that many holstien high input herds down here anymore
My point of reference is lots of farmers I know who do house their cows 100% make more profit at the milk prices we have seen over the last 3 years. Also, I run a middle of the road system with autumn calving cows and can see the benefits of housed systems.
@FarmTheoryNI you've spoken before why you like grazing. A video on the financial figures would be interesting. I would encourage you to keep grazing anyway, more natural and more resilient to low milk price years
Would you be better using on off grazing when fields are so wet. You have the cubicles bedded anyway. Our robot milked cows hardly made a mark last week when it poured, where as parlour milked cows nearby standing at the gate waiting to get in made a mess Shocking revelation that parlour milked cows are more needing housed than robot cows!!😮
@@WilliamCooper2005 If that makes you happy then thats great. I understand that. For me, one of the best things is listening to the rain on the roof and watching it running down the yard knowing it is not affecting my cows.
@FarmTheoryNI if its all to usher in agenda 2030 by our overlords then yes I will agree. As a dairy farmer in Somerset I'm very worried what's happening all over the world!
Great video. Keep up the good work.
Great video with real in depth analysis and savage honesty. Hope you got to get back on your holiday
Thanks! Might go away next week for a few nights. 👌
'What a pro' 😅 😂
You are certainty correct about the weather. Our cows have gone up 3 litres just because of dry weather, the same buffer fed silage, and strip grazing the same field. I've also got some 10.4 ME silage, which was our second part of the first cut, I should have cut the lot early, but I thought that I would give it another week and It came a monsoon and couldn't get it cut for an extra 10 days longer. So that wet spell in May will have an impact on 3-4 months of winter milk production for us, too.
Crazy for a small country, we're not far off a drought here in wexford, another dry week and growth will be under pressure again
That's mad! 😅
Your videos are amazing
Glad you like them!
Great content Andrew, you could try this time of year before a wet day pre mow ahead of the cows give them a section as you normally do....if grass is good quality they should eat it quickly and take them off immediately when grass is eaten..it should stop them ploughing around.. i premow myself regularly instead of topping works well hope this helps or might be a good or bad experiment 🤔 😅
Appreciating the reassurance that its OK to have to pick from only bad options this year!
Spreading lime but still compacting in July what's that about!!!
Looking well in the wee jeep and caravan yesterday in Garvagh lol
Thanks! 🤣
I’m blown away it’s so wet in Ireland. Dry as a bone here in Essex, grass turning yellow with lack of rain and high temperatures!
Tbh I would take wet weather over drought!
Bless you’re honesty,👍
Great Video Andrew, Climate is always the major variable in farming! I understand you attempt to do the best you can! But sometimes you have no option that is perfect, in fact often no satisfactory options and that is why a Farm Managers job is very challenging, given the amount of regrassing you are doing have you considered cropping some of the more remote paddocks? Are Fodder Beet, and whole crop grain silage possible choices? thanks for sharing
Anything other than grass needs everything to go perfect to have any advantage. I just keep it simple.
Looks like you will be catching the trail end of hurricane Debbie on Monday into Tuesday, 🎉
Yeah, I seen that! 4am Monday night. Red rainfall warning. 🙌🤣
Very informative 👏
Great video. Brilliant explanation of the bad quality silage on the out farm… from what you said I would have judged it to be good silage on first principles without getting the details ref compaction & old lea etc. Interesting that you can relate DM to rainfall and £ earnings on a daily, weekly & monthly basis… while the weather is bad & you’re decision making is constrained at least you know what’s going on real time. Keep up the good work.
Thank you very much! Farming isn't easy. 🤣
Andrew I occasionally watch your videos from the grain growing area in Western Australia Goomalling Near Dowering We are having our big field days Show on at the end of August worth a look My history started off as a farmer in the South Laois and dairy farming pre quota 40 years ago or thereabouts Yes I know your part of the country as I bought a combine harvester out of Omagh many years ago I think you need to make your videos a bit more entertaining Bit like Farmer Phil ,as you tube has got so competitive for viewers it takes a special to get the numbers I first got into following Y T many years ago when it first started , got tired of the amount of nonsense that was on it, started following some of the Americans Millennial Farmer, Armless farmer , Mike Mitchell + a few. More As at that time most of the Irish were videos and Music and the young Farmer Phil ‘ Finnigans Farm yourself came along My opinion of Irish Dairy farming is that for the owners comfort there needs to be a reassessment on running the maximum numbers ,and that is going on my N Z Experience of near 50 years ago, actually 49 years ago today Aug 16th Two other chaps and I landed in NZ to work for a year on Dairy farms,sent by Macra Na Feirma with the aim of coming back to Ireland to push dairying forward , Looks like it worked. One of my experiences there was that I was working as a manager on a 200 Cow dairy farm on the Huraki plains flat country The lad who was there helping me , a Doctors son from Auckland can you imagine that happening in Ireland in the seventies?? Anyway one of my observations was that I found that most of the farmers were getting burned out physically etc in their mid 40 ties This young actually wanted him and I to take on a share milking contract together I didn’t Went back to my 30 cows in Ireland didn’t quite work out after some years headed for Australia did a bit of work on farming and after a while went towards the mining industry that’s where the $$$ were and never looked back
Like your videos but I feel that watching from out. Ireland we need a bit more entertaining
maybe give the cows some umbrellas 🙂. More great information. As a non farmer i could guess why you might umbilical rather than a tank would be good to know if im correct.
SQL queries on the farm ! ! I am REALLY impressed
🤣 It's very useful!
Great video
Mix grass seed onto ur slurry when it's fully mixed..👍
Save u reseeding all at once 👌
Keep the faith with grazing
I see commodity prices for maze grain (corn) and cattle here in the US are way down this week, one guy saying his 1yo steers are down $160 per head just this week,
What's the cause?
@@FarmTheoryNI imho, the projections for this years crop yield are pretty high, A general feeling that there is an economic slowdown down about to happen, And the very high prices were unsustainable.
Zero grazer lad yup I was sceptical at first but my son went and bought a secondhand one for small money back in 18 and 6 years later we are on our second one and it’s a game changer. We keep the cows in every night and if the weather is poor , in reality dry matter doesn’t really affect the cows as much because we can get far more input from zero grazed grass ( don’t ask me why but cows eat more grass if you put it in front of them rather than letting them cut it themselves) also you get far better grass utilisation.
We farm in Belgium, and farm 70% gras and 30% mais, this year we started with zero grazing to try and feed more grass to the cows. After 4 months we found out that the cows produce 3to5 liters less then in winter. But now we can feed mutch cheaper with omost no protein additive. Also we didn't buy byproducts (brewers grain or dry distillers grain). With this milkprice i think it's more intteresting to feed hard then to feed cheap. There is also a big difference in grassfields (old pastures or reseeded fresh fields). Now we had 10 days no rain and today 35degree tempreture so zero grazing will be on the way back if rain doesn't come next days (sorry for my bad english).
@@boerstevenvdv The English is considerably better than my Dutch, I 100percent agree with you regarding old grass versus new seeds , zero grazing is far more beneficial with new grass and it is all about reducing costs we feed grass and 3 kilos of a 15 percent dairy ration and are producing 1.87 kilos of milk solids per head from cows 176 days calved on average. Our cost of production has plummeted since we started using the zero grazer , in fairness our level of production has dropped but the bottom line ( profit) has increased significantly.
@@boerstevenvdv sorry I just assumed Dutch because I don’t know many French speakers from Belgium so I hope i didn’t offend.
Great job
Second and great video farm theory
Failing milk processors,supermarkets cancelling contracts.poor milk prices,dreadful weather,why do we bother.
Definitely been asking myself the same. 😅
Don't be too sore on yourself over "bad decisions' Andrew. Like everyone else you plan for things to go well. Things won't look so bad when you look back over the entire year
If I was in your shoes I would talk to my ration supplier for a high energy dairy nut with max protein of 14%. Your cows are crying out for more energy. You know that yourself!
I am on a 20% protein high fibre nut. Your spot on I should switch but things have already changed and we are back up to 23l today. The high fibre is to drive intakes of what should be good grazed grass.
Hi, where do you get the orange oxygen barrier silage cover
We have had mad amounts of sun and the ground is rock solid
Could I rent it off you? 🤣
Fantastic silage will never beat grass no matter how good it is on paper. We have seen it and tested it here with zero grazing. The extra litres produced at night from zero graze grass over the best silage is ridiculous.
If you feed enough meal it should keep milk up. And cover for the grass situation. I think your meal isnt good enough. Iv seen before how things change by changing meal. You could feed maze meal on top of the silage. Its not too expensive to buy. Their was a great dairy man near me here. He is dead now. He had 300 dairy cows in the 1990s. Which was a lot here then. I heard him say 1nc. That he was over in Holland years before and it amazed him how much they wer getting out of basically the same cows. He said if you put the right ingredients into your cow its amazing what she can produce. With silage going to be tight and quality down on both silage and grass. Meal is your best bet. Straight grains are cheapish. A ton of straw at moment is more than a ton of barley.
Also I see up until this week people here in the US were paying $600 to $900 a head for 10 day old Holstein angus cross calves, How does that compare to NI at the moment?
Be lucky to get 60 to 90 euro for a 10 day old calf in southern Ireland that's mental price for them
@@JamesOBrien2253 yea it has fallen back a bit now within the past week or so , but it was crazy there for a while,
Probably get £200-£300 here.
Where do you buy the silage cover from?
FaneValley stores
Will you have enough silage for the winter
I hope so, if I get a dry week in September I will
We only put the cows out the day because the ground was so wet
Is your grazing ground compacted from two years of poor grazing conditions
Yes, need a dry spell to fix a lot of it.
@FarmTheoryNI we be hoping for good hard frost this winter
@@FarmTheoryNI what do you plan to do to fix it?
Where do you get ur silage tested
FaneValley feeds do a great job, sample back next day
Drone shots are great Andrew 👍.On weather etc ,you know very well that it’s lack of quality sunshine this year for most of your problems especially after a very wet start ,trying to get lamb/beef/milk from grass is always a challenge the best of times .Think positive ,life can be a bitch sometimes !
Thanks!
I watch u from NY Andrew I’m here 30 years from a farm in Antrim but coming home for good in new year I’m a contractor here an bringing few machines back with me when I do I’ll offer u some help on farm u don’t need pay me I’ve made my money maybe we can get u some drainage in u cover the diesel ok anyway maybe I’ll see u in future I love the channel u do know what your on about
Have you done the maths on the profitability on housing the cows? Are you confident when you say that you'd make more money? I'm in the south, I can not see any way here that housing full time would be profitable as costs would be so high. In what way is it different up there?
@@adriant900 was thinking same thing even if they lose milk outside what milk they do have at least has some margin. No wonder there's not that many holstien high input herds down here anymore
My point of reference is lots of farmers I know who do house their cows 100% make more profit at the milk prices we have seen over the last 3 years. Also, I run a middle of the road system with autumn calving cows and can see the benefits of housed systems.
@FarmTheoryNI you've spoken before why you like grazing.
A video on the financial figures would be interesting.
I would encourage you to keep grazing anyway, more natural and more resilient to low milk price years
First 🎉
🥇
Blame the milk yield on a high number of hiefers in the herd
If was fine until two weeks ago, but yeah, that is a part of it. We had TB for 18 months.
top top video again .top job
Would you be better using on off grazing when fields are so wet. You have the cubicles bedded anyway. Our robot milked cows hardly made a mark last week when it poured, where as parlour milked cows nearby standing at the gate waiting to get in made a mess
Shocking revelation that parlour milked cows are more needing housed than robot cows!!😮
The rain just came so fast there wasn't even a chance to plan. 😅 I probably should have checked the forecast a bit closer.
@@FarmTheoryNI thoughts on on/off grazing
You enjoy making silage, Grazing frustrates you and destroys your fields.Its only a matter of time(fully housed).
One of the best things about farming cattle is getting to watch the cows outside enjoying some fresh grass.
@@WilliamCooper2005 If that makes you happy then thats great. I understand that. For me, one of the best things is listening to the rain on the roof and watching it running down the yard knowing it is not affecting my cows.
We will get a good grazing next year and I will be loving it again. 😅
You want to look up GEO ENGINEERING OR WEATHER MANIPULATION.
Totally believe that is happening now all to destroy food production and blame climate change
I have, I should do a video on it. 😅 You probably won't agree with my conclusion
@FarmTheoryNI if its all to usher in agenda 2030 by our overlords then yes I will agree. As a dairy farmer in Somerset I'm very worried what's happening all over the world!