I’m just back from a week’s break in a holiday home on the Galway coast. It was lovely to get away but I’m happy to be home.

While the rest of the crew were interested in getting into the water and our first restaurant (albeit outdoor) experience in 18 months, I was just as interested in the stock on the land.

There were lots of Connemara ponies with young foals, hills ewes with young lambs, and cows with young calves.

On a walk out to Omey Island at low tide, we came across a farmer moving some stock and I had a busman’s holiday moment when I stood on the road to turn back a cow that had slipped by him.

In the next field, there was another group of cows and calves and, while the cows were a mix of ordinary Continental types, the young calves at foot were a different story.

They were outstanding, a lovely bunch of U-grade Charolais. They would be an absolute credit to any farmer anywhere in the country.

Whether it’s cattle or horses or sheep, every stock person always admires good-quality animals that are well looked-after, and wants to know how they are bred.

The calves were so consistent and there was no sign of a stock bull anywhere, so I assume they were AI.

I took a pic of them with the intention of looking them up on the ICBF website, but unfortunately, my photography skills let me down and I couldn’t read the tags when I zoomed in.

As for our own calves, the last of them will be weaned this week. They are the youngest heifer calves.

On the weighings of weaned calves we have done, they have performed really well since the spring.

Barring a hiccup, the bull calves should comfortably make their target weight for housing.

Our usual target is that the bull calves would average close to 500kg liveweight on September 1. This leaves them set up for a 400kg carcase at under 16 months.

Maybe something we need to look at is, come housing time, should we be picking out some of the heavier bulls and trying to finish them at the target weight a month earlier? It’s something I will have to talk to our local factory about.

I believe it is becoming ever important to discuss your plans/options with your customer, especially where young bulls are concerned.

The first of the calves are due to be born around July 20 and we need to sort the cows into three groups: heifers/cows that are due to calve before the end of July; those due to calve in August; and the September/October calvers.

We will work off a print-off from the Kingwood computer programme showing projected calving dates, and put all the cows and heifers through the crush, and draft them accordingly.

The group due to calve in July will also get their IBR booster and their shot of Rotovac.

We took our first-cut silage on May 27, when the weather was still a bit broken. We mowed it down, tedded it out and rowed it up in the one dry day. We were pleasantly surprised at how dry the grass was.

Though the fields weren’t closed up until the end of March, the grass bulked up really well in the pit, which is fuller than it has been for a long time.

When we opened the pit, two weeks later, to put in some paddocks that had been taken out, there was a lovely smell off the silage even at that stage. So we should have very good-quality feed.

Like a lot of farms, we have had an explosion of grass in the last few weeks, so have a good few paddocks that need to be taken out. Some of them will be OK to go into the pit with the second-cut silage, others need to be taken out now.

We plan to cut another 15 acres of silage this coming week. We hope it will be quite stemmy because it will be used in July and August to be fed to the cows before calving.

We also have two paddocks let up for hay and will hopefully get that in the next couple of weeks. We didn’t make any hay last year, so we need to top up our stocks.

A few bales of hay in the shed is always very handy. As the saying goes, ‘old hay is old gold’.

 

Robin Talbot farms in Ballacolla, Co Laois, in partnership with his mother Pam and wife Ann