Grass

This week’s grass walk took place on Monday. Results show that the farm is in a good position facing into the final two months of the grazing year.

The average farm cover is currently 1,239kg DM/ha and with demand running at 31kg DM/ha/day, that provides a very healthy 40 days worth of grass ahead of stock.

Tullamore farm grass wedge, 23/09/2019.

Growth for the last seven days was on par with the national average at 51kg DM/ha/day.

Thoughts now are turning towards autumn closing. The plan is to start closing ground from this weekend onwards and, sticking to an autumn grazing planner, there should be roughly 60% of the farm closed and growing by the first week in November.

Cattle

The first of the cows due to calve next spring were weaned on Friday. Eight cows were pulled out of the group and put in the shed.

These will be the earliest-calving cows next spring and they also had the strongest calves suckling them. The calves remain with the main group.

The cull cows were weaned two weeks ago. They have since dried off and are now starting meal feeding. They are currently on 3kg/day.

Next week, some of the first-calved heifers will be weaned. The overall plan is to wean the calves in small batches, approximately one batch per week.

Four heifers were slaughtered this week. These would have been comrades of the heifers on show at this year’s Tullamore Farm open day. Their kill-out performance is shown in Table 1.

Sheep

Sheep Ireland was on the farm this week carrying out a flock assessment and data collection.

Weight, BCS, dag score and age were recorded. Darren Carty will have a full report of this next week.

Twenty-one lambs and six cull ewes were slaughtered during the week too. The lambs averaged 20.3kg and came in to €97.61/head. Three graded U, with the rest grading R.

The ewes killed out at an average of 32.68kg and made €84.98/head. There are just 13 lambs left to sell.

Athlone IT

Tullamore Farm hosted a group of students from Athlone IT during the week. Shaun, along with beef editor Adam Woods, was on hand to give the students a rundown on the beef, sheep and grass systems on the farm, as well as a look into some environmental aspects of commercial Irish farms.