What's your AFC

Slowcow

Member
Anyone got a formula for young stock dry matter intakes vs live weight?
Mostly British Friesian heifer's and crosses.
Been paddock grazing cows for a couple years, its got to pay to do the young stock too (y)
 

hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
Anyone got a formula for young stock dry matter intakes vs live weight?
Mostly British Friesian heifer's and crosses.
Been paddock grazing cows for a couple years, its got to pay to do the young stock too (y)
I'd work on DM intakes of about 2.5% of their bodyweight that's about adlib. Remember they will be growing though so as their weight increases so will their DM requirements. There is some good stuff on the ahdb website somewhere and on the NZ beef and lamb website as well but I can't remember what it's called. The NZ one was a calculator you put the liveweight I'm and it spat out how much DM they needed.
 

unlacedgecko

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Fife
I'd work on DM intakes of about 2.5% of their bodyweight that's about adlib. Remember they will be growing though so as their weight increases so will their DM requirements. There is some good stuff on the ahdb website somewhere and on the NZ beef and lamb website as well but I can't remember what it's called. The NZ one was a calculator you put the liveweight I'm and it spat out how much DM they needed.

The AHDB website has a feed planner which gives feed requirements at each stage of production cycle, in terms of %LW.
 

Slowcow

Member
Thanks, that's what I'm after, I'd like to try and start roughly right then tweak it as I go.

How long are folks leaving young stock in paddocks? I do 36 hrs for cows, was thinking 48hrs then I've the option to go every other day? The lady we rent the ground from likes to go and see them anyway.
 

hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
Thanks, that's what I'm after, I'd like to try and start roughly right then tweak it as I go.

How long are folks leaving young stock in paddocks? I do 36 hrs for cows, was thinking 48hrs then I've the option to go every other day? The lady we rent the ground from likes to go and see them anyway.
For me at the minute it depends on the size of the field that I have. I split it if it's easy with terrain, footpaths and water but having mostly natural stream water makes it awkward to split some. It's only an infrastructure problem though as soon as I have water in every field sorted and some semi permanent fences put in I'll move more often.
More often the better but 48hrs sounds like a good compromise. I don't think you will lose any potential grass growth as long as you move them before 4-5 day's or so they say. But I always find that the grass gets a bit stale after they have been there more than 3 day's and they don't like it as much. It must affect intakes and possibly animal performance of it goes like that?
 

Slowcow

Member
What covers would folks be putting yearlings in to? The cows go in around 3100 ish depending on demand.

I was thinking of starting young stock a bit shorter? Maybe try and work out the paddock size so they go in at 2600-2700, then as they grow, increase the cover instead of the paddock size? Right track or a bad plan?

I use field area measure app on my phone for planning out paddocks, its a bit fiddly if you have 'fingers like thumbs! ' but save a lot of FAFF when putting the fences down.

Screenshot_20200403-093249.png


This is the dairy cow paddocks. The ads are a bit annoying but its free.
What's anyone else using?
 

hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
What covers would folks be putting yearlings in to? The cows go in around 3100 ish depending on demand.

I was thinking of starting young stock a bit shorter? Maybe try and work out the paddock size so they go in at 2600-2700, then as they grow, increase the cover instead of the paddock size? Right track or a bad plan?

I use field area measure app on my phone for planning out paddocks, its a bit fiddly if you have 'fingers like thumbs! ' but save a lot of FAFF when putting the fences down.

View attachment 868008

This is the dairy cow paddocks. The ads are a bit annoying but its free.
What's anyone else using?
Sounds like a good plan. Not sure how the experts would do it though hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me will be able to advise.
Yes I use it. Like you say it's a bit fiddling to use but better than nothing. I've been meaning to see if I could put it on wife's iPad thinking a bigger screen would help. I wouldn't be able to take it to the field but there are enough on hedge trees and odd corners or something I can aim for so I know roughly where to put the fences. It wouldn't be ideal but it's still better than what I was doing before which was nothing :LOL:
 

Slowcow

Member
Oh and what software are folks using for the grass wedge, I use agrinet and have recommended it but when I asked how I set up a second wedge they said pay another €60 for each wedge o_O I've already paid €100 for the first one!
 

Slowcow

Member
Sounds like a good plan. Not sure how the experts would do it though hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me will be able to advise.
Yes I use it. Like you say it's a bit fiddling to use but better than nothing. I've been meaning to see if I could put it on wife's iPad thinking a bigger screen would help. I wouldn't be able to take it to the field but there are enough on hedge trees and odd corners or something I can aim for so I know roughly where to put the fences. It wouldn't be ideal but it's still better than what I was doing before which was nothing :LOL:

You have take the wife as well as her iPad!
 

hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
Oh and what software are folks using for the grass wedge, I use agrinet and have recommended it but when I asked how I set up a second wedge they said pay another €60 for each wedge o_O I've already paid €100 for the first one!
I'm just using an excel spreadsheet I was sent through our farming connect prosper from pasture group. It works but I don't use it as often or as well as I should or could do. And usually forget to save it as well :banghead:
I'll try and get a better handle on that when we get back to better rotations after lambing. Things have sort of gone to sh!t here this last week :bag:
Going to try and mob up some ewes and lambs this weekend though and drift off any calved cows (2 so far...) to join them.
 
What covers would folks be putting yearlings in to? The cows go in around 3100 ish depending on demand.

I was thinking of starting young stock a bit shorter? Maybe try and work out the paddock size so they go in at 2600-2700, then as they grow, increase the cover instead of the paddock size? Right track or a bad plan?

I use field area measure app on my phone for planning out paddocks, its a bit fiddly if you have 'fingers like thumbs! ' but save a lot of FAFF when putting the fences down.

View attachment 868008

This is the dairy cow paddocks. The ads are a bit annoying but its free.
What's anyone else using?

Yea I use FieldAreaMeasure app. I think it’s very good for a free one. You can sit on your settee plotting out paddocks and then when you’re out putting them up the little GPS blue dot shows where to put them within a couple metres
 

unlacedgecko

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Fife
What covers would folks be putting yearlings in to? The cows go in around 3100 ish depending on demand.

I was thinking of starting young stock a bit shorter? Maybe try and work out the paddock size so they go in at 2600-2700, then as they grow, increase the cover instead of the paddock size? Right track or a bad plan?

I use field area measure app on my phone for planning out paddocks, its a bit fiddly if you have 'fingers like thumbs! ' but save a lot of FAFF when putting the fences down.

View attachment 868008

This is the dairy cow paddocks. The ads are a bit annoying but its free.
What's anyone else using?
Yea I use FieldAreaMeasure app. I think it’s very good for a free one. You can sit on your settee plotting out paddocks and then when you’re out putting them up the little GPS blue dot shows where to put them within a couple metres

I’ve paid a wee bit extra to upgrade to premium. Means I can save in groups (with pretty colours) and sync across devices. I do my planning on the larger iPad screen in the evening then on the ground fence building using the phone.
 

hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
Right so some found this interesting so I thought I'd update now that lambing is down to the last bunch of stragglers that will drag on into may :rolleyes:
Lambing all at grass went well. Had some troubles with prolapses but other than that much easier (and cheaper!) than running round emptying a snacker every day dumping money on the ground. My maths was near enough and the weather was kind so we didn't run out of grass. Measured my farm cover 10 days ago and it was 1750 so it's gone up a bit even as my demand went up. I think my demand last time I wrote was 7kg/DM/ha and that was just one mob of twins rotating over the overwintered grass. It's about 18kg/day now the singles joined them and the cattle are mostly out. It will go up again when the rest of the ewes lamb, my ewe lambs that aren't lambing come back off the rough grazing and the rest of the cows calve and go from maintenance to adlib feeding. And as the youngstock grow and need more feed of course.
Farm cover is still lower than I would like it to be. I'm going to do a few things differently this winter and next spring. I left some heifers out grazing down a poor rough looking residual after the ewes moved through at tupping and that 30 acre block wasn't shut out properly until late December early January. Well I won't be doing that again! It took a bloody long time to recover I'd have been better off leaving it as a crappy looking residual so it could grow. Or taking the ewes back there to chop it off they would have done it much quicker and cleaner even if it did mean taking them off their planned round for a bit. It could have been at a cover of 2000+ if I'd not done that instead of 1500 that it was in march.
Another thing I will do differently, and I never thought I'd say this, is use my sheep shed again :eek: and house some of the shearlings or the ewe lambs :eek:its not been used to lamb in since 2017 and now only gets used for keeping sheep on before shearing so I may as well use it. They will use some straw bit I think that's going to be cheap compared to more rested fields come spring. I had them all on sacrifice fields eating bales of silage this winter to keep them off most of the fields ready for spring. Well it worked ok mostly... apart form some of them didn't know what silage was and they lost condition in the time it took them to learn what silage was :banghead::banghead: under set stocking they would have had a lot of acres to pick at some wouldn't eat any silage at all probably (but I didn't know that then) but they would do fine having so much area to pick at. So this year I didn't think that some just wouldn't eat. And they just roamed round the sacrifice fields looking for grass that wasn't there :banghead::banghead: and went from BCS 3-3.5 to BCS 2 ? this happened in the space of a couple of weeks made worse by the constant wet miserable weather they had at the time. It most likely explains the disappointing scan we had in the young ewes and ewe lambs as well :banghead:?:cautious: FFS never mind you live and learn. It won't happen again. They can go in the shed to learn what silage is without the distraction of looking for non existent grass. It would be a good chance to break the fluke lifecycle as well and get to use a different product. But the main reason I'll be housing them is to get them off more of the fields ready for spring. The most convenient place for them to be on sacrifice fields are quite large fields, one is 47acres the other is 2 fields totaling 30odd acres because of logistics with water and dry places to put the bales. They also have wet patches so I can't ram stock in them like I would a drier turnip field. Then I had to open up another 4 acre steep bit for them to have somewhere dry to lie down as everywhere was soaking wet this winter. So my sacrifice fields area was much bigger than it needed to be. It was 80+ acres when it could have been half that if I had less sheep on the ground. I won't be able to house all the shearlings and ewe lambs bit could house one of those groups. So my sacrifice area will be half what it was this past winter. Another 40odd acres of rested fields would make a massive difference come march! They are the reason the AFC is so low they are sat at 1200kg when they could be 2000+ of they had been rested.
This time next year we will be in a much better position again even with more sheep and cattle. And this year had been much better than any previous years I remember. Onwards and upwards (y)
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
Good stuff, and interesting too @hendrebc

The pasture cover here is lowering, but the farm cover is increasing by about the same amount as the winter covercrop area has really shot away (especially the pasture base under it, which is probably 3000-4400kgDM/ha on its own).
I think the time has come for us to move the heifer mob in with the lambs, and put the yearling bulls onto the ugly bits of covercrop, I'd like to give the riparian areas a light grazing now ahead of the wet season, just got the new fences twitched up and electrified over the weekend.
We've a mob of calves coming around the end of May to help turn that feed into cashflow.
Average pasture cover on the grass area will be about 2250-2300 now, which is about where I think it should be.
 

hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
Another thing I've done this year to make rotating easier is I've mobbed up the lambs by age instead of having older twins in one place and the singles the same age somewhere else then the younger twins and singles separate again. As I lambed the singles this year I drifted them through into the same mob as the twin born ones. So now I have mob of 350ish ewes with lambs all the same age instead of 2 separate ones. And I'll have a slightly smaller mob of the same but younger lambs. So that's 2 mobs instead of 4 that will make life much easier. Will probably put the store cattle with one of those mobs of sheep and the cows and calves with the other mob as well.
Couldn't really see a downside to putting the singles with the twins as it's still not a massive mob. Singles could maybe do with less feed but they will also be the first to go to slaughter so why would I not put them on adlib? Will see how it goes but I don't think it will be a problem. It's too late to do anything about it now anyway :LOL:
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
Another thing I've done this year to make rotating easier is I've mobbed up the lambs by age instead of having older twins in one place and the singles the same age somewhere else then the younger twins and singles separate again. As I lambed the singles this year I drifted them through into the same mob as the twin born ones. So now I have mob of 350ish ewes with lambs all the same age instead of 2 separate ones. And I'll have a slightly smaller mob of the same but younger lambs. So that's 2 mobs instead of 4 that will make life much easier. Will probably put the store cattle with one of those mobs of sheep and the cows and calves with the other mob as well.
Couldn't really see a downside to putting the singles with the twins as it's still not a massive mob. Singles could maybe do with less feed but they will also be the first to go to slaughter so why would I not put them on adlib? Will see how it goes but I don't think it will be a problem. It's too late to do anything about it now anyway :LOL:
Interesting... (y) I've got all winter to work out how we're going to lamb these hoggs in the spring. I guess it will be roughly similar to what we do now, just with less backfencing - move them daily (at least) and let the stragglers with lambs catch up in their own time.
They're reaching expert level at moving now, that will help come lambing time I'm sure.
We separated them from the bulls today (hung a reel over the gateway) and put the heifers in instead, which will help with our electric fencing resources going forward.
I really need to get away from 3 strands and back to two, ASAP.
 

hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
Interesting... (y) I've got all winter to work out how we're going to lamb these hoggs in the spring. I guess it will be roughly similar to what we do now, just with less backfencing - move them daily (at least) and let the stragglers with lambs catch up in their own time.
They're reaching expert level at moving now, that will help come lambing time I'm sure.
We separated them from the bulls today (hung a reel over the gateway) and put the heifers in instead, which will help with our electric fencing resources going forward.
I really need to get away from 3 strands and back to two, ASAP.
Main reason I did that was most of my fields are too big to be able to rotate round with a lot of small mobs. If I had everything separate like we did before we would have to set stock because we wouldn't have enough fields to do it and the small mobs would never be able to eat the grass fast enough. Easiest way to do anything about it was to put 2 groups into one. Or 3 groups into one when I've got he cattle with the ewes and lambs as well. When the lambs are older I'll try and split some with electric then we should be able to do abetter job again.
 

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