SEASONAL WORK ON THE FARM

Te Ao Hou, April 1958, Page 48

SEASONAL WORK ON THE FARM EXPERIMENTS SHOW IMPORT- ANCE OF FEEDING DAIRY COWS WELL IN WINTER Experiments have shown that cows fed well during winter will produce from 26lb to 63lb more butterfat in the following lactation than those poorly fed during winter, states the Department of Agriculture. These results were obtained when both groups were well fed after calving. It is therefore very important to feed the cows well from now until calving so that they have ample body reserves to draw on during the first 2 months of the lactation. It is difficult to build up these body reserves with even liberal amounts of hay or silage, or both, unless some grass is also available throughout the dry period. With a portion of the farm closed in autumn to save pasture for feeding after calving it is particularly important to graze the rest of the farm under a controlled rotational grazing system with adequate spelling between grazings. This is done both to ensure continued grass growth during winter and to ration what grass is available throughout this period. Where sub-division is inadequate break grazing with the electric fence is essential. Since cows will eat grass in preferance to most other feeds, they should be fed as much hay as they will clean up in addition to 20lb of silage per cow per day. GRAZING DAIRY COWS ON WET MEADOW LANDS Normal dairy farm practice is to close paddocks in succession from mid April to mid-June to provide feed for late winter and early spring. While this is being done the herd, which is drying off, is rotated on a restricted pasture area and the feed supplemented with hay or silage. This practice is most successful on well-drained soils, but often requires modification on poorly drained soils, says the Department of Agriculture. On heavy meadow soils, particularly in wet winters, rationed grazing may not be practicable at certain periods. On the wetter farms even the normal paddock-by-paddock rotational grazing may have to be abandoned temporarily and replaced by a policy of spreading the herd over a larger area of the farm by placing a few cows in each paddock. A concentration of stock at the rate of 15 cows per acre or more, as dictated by a normal subdivisional plan, can lead to the almost complete destruction of the pasture in each paddock as it is grazed in its turn. Cows which have calved may be operated for a period as one herd, but as their numbers increase it may be wiser to divide the calved cows into two or more groups and rotate each group over three or four paddocks. As soon as conditions permit, rotational grazing should be reverted to and saved pasture should be rationed with the electric fence. A winter run-off can be of tremendous assistance to the satisfactory management of soils which poach, but it is not the complete answer, since the calved cows must be returned to the farm while the land is still wet, so that the grazing management which has been outlined must still be adhered to. Because it is not always possible to ration saved pasture and because conditions may not be suitable for feeding out silage, much greater reliance has to be placed on hay, and to reduce poaching and minimise waste this should be fed from racks set up on a concrete strip.