After a couple of seasons of having good grass cover through summer, this season has thrown a spanner in the works. It’s not very different from other drought years, however the payout is so good!

Yes, it is, but ultimately this is the time to set up the farm and the herd for next season – so decisions need to be targeted towards looking after cow health and cow condition while aiming to get to adequate pasture cover at calving.

This means prioritising where to use the feed available, estimating whether more feed is needed to last through the dry period, and making targeted drying off decisions.

What does that mean?

Goal 1: get cows to a BCS target at calving.

Cows will strip condition off fairly quickly during lactation if they’re not getting enough. A lot of our cows these days are genetically ‘programmed’ to produce milk. This means that they’ll prioritise making milk at a cost of their own condition. A lot of you might have seen it happen this year around the end of January/early February when the pasture quality and quantity dropped steeply.

Depending on the type of feed available during the dry period, it’ll take time to put this condition back on. It’s not a simple matter of just pumping the feed into them, as the intakes and uptakes are limiting factors. Grass growth will be variable, and pasture can’t be hammered either as you need to build up sufficient cover for calving.

Goal 2: get average pasture cover (APC) to target levels at calving.

Mature cows on pasture only during the dry period will take an average of 4-5 weeks to gain a condition score – and add another 2-3 weeks for 2- and 3-year-olds. They’ll only start to gain condition once they’ve properly dried off e.g., 2 weeks after drying off and they’ll stop gaining condition at the end of gestation e.g., during the last 3-4 weeks.

• Tally this up and a mature cow that needs to gain a score (from BCS 4 to BCS 5 is common) will need 9-12 weeks to get to calving BCS on a grass diet only.
• This process can be sped up with the addition of high ME supplements e.g., PK.

This is cool stuff, but what am I going to do with this information?

You can use this to prioritise cows for drying off. For example, your first calvers calving in July will need longer to get to target so they should be dried off first. On top of this, they won’t be your best producers so it’s not the best bang for your buck to keep feeding them your expensive supplement too. A couple of options:

• If you haven’t already, get rid of the cull cows.
• Get an individual BCS done for your herd which will give you the recommended drying off dates per animal – we use BCS, calving dates, and age to calculate dates for you. This will also take the guesswork out of your drying off decisions.
• Feed budget – what have you got vs what do you need? Talk to one of our farm systems vets if you’d like some help with this.