Of all the weather events to hit a farm in springtime, snow is probably the worst. When it snows, it rains twice. First at the actual snow event and secondly when that snow melts.

There was widespread snow across much of Munster and Leinster on Monday. While most of it has melted, land is saturated and grazing is next to impossible in most locations.

That said, there was cows out grazing in Wexford today. There will be more on this in print and online next Thursday.

Issues

An issue with snow is that it gets into places you wouldn’t expect. Unlike rain, which tends to fall linearly, snow tends to oscillate in the sky and will make its way into farm buildings, causing wet beds under calves and cows.

These beds must be cleaned out and replaced, particularly for calves, as a wet bed will lead to lots of other health problems.

If cows are going to be inside for the next few days, consider increasing the amount of meal to them

If cows are housed and being fed silage, even good-quality silage, they will be in a higher degree of negative energy balance than they would if they were out grazing. This is because spring grass is high in energy.

Therefore, if cows are going to be inside for the next few days, consider increasing the amount of meal to them.

However, I’d be slow to feed more than 4kg of meal per cow to freshly calved cows. Feeding good-quality silage to the milking cows is a pre-requisite.

Negative energy balance

Another way of reducing the negative energy balance is to milk the cows once a day for this period of bad weather.

With cows inside, the risk of mastitis is also greater, so extra precautions should be taken to help prevent the spread of environmental mastitis.

Scraping down and disinfecting cubicle beds is a good measure. This should be done at a minimum twice a day. Keep passageways clean, so that cows are bringing less faecal matter up on to cubicle beds.

The forecast is for a continuation of the wet weather

The main objective should be to get cows back out to grass as soon as possible. There’s no doubt that this will be a challenge this week, as the forecast is for a continuation of the wet weather.

Farmers who are geared towards grazing will have a decision to make regarding how much damage they are willing to let happen. This can be reduced by grazing dry fields and managing intakes and allowances.

It might be necessary to start considering what paddocks are your go-to paddocks for this spring. These paddocks could be earmarked for reseeding later in the year, so the tolerance for damaging these might be higher.

Read more

Calving off to a good start in Cork

Dairy management: knowing how much grass to give