Managing wintery conditions at Stratford Demonstration Farm

The winter pad herd enjoying the warm shelter on a wet day.

Winter weather had generally been relatively benign for farming until mid July when a good southerly storm gave us some cold wet wintery weather and all that comes with it.

For this winter and the next three or four years the Stratford Demonstration farm has been to set the farm up for the new wintering pad use trial on the farm. For this the farm is operating a two-herd farmlet trial.

Both herds will be equal in stock numbers and have equal feed inputs but one herd is using the covered stand-off feed pad every night over the winter and calving and as milkers during very wet conditions while the control herd is on standard paddock wintering. The winter pad herd is being fed the same grass area as the control herd but is on-off grazing and getting their supplements fed on the pad.

The aim of the trial is to assess the pasture pugging, pasture growth, supplementary feed utilisation, milk production , stock health and calculated environmental effects of the covered pad wintering along with any other issues that may arise along with the economics.

The trial was started in early June with both farmlets wintering 3.4 Jersey cow/ha and the cows on around 21 to 23 m²/cow of grass for a 130 day rotation.

This equals 4.4 kg DM/cow/day of grass plus they are getting 3-plus kg DM of silage. June rainfall on the farm was less than half average levels and temperatures above average.

This generally made for easy wintering however even small levels of rain resulted in some pugging by the control herd and some more severe pugging on a few very wet days while the winter pad herd has avoided this.

During the southerly storm the benefit of the covered shelter was especially welcome by the pad herd while the control herd had to put up with being stood of on races and yards etc in the miserable conditions.

The farm is reasonably well set up for the start of calving at this stage.

Average pasture cover at 2300 kg DM/ha is adequate while cow condition is good and there is enough silage and hay for dry cows to the end of calving and some PKE for early milkers as required.

The dry and calving cows will remain on around 21 m²/cow/day of grass plus silage or hay while milkers will start on around 50 m²/cow/day and trying to hold to the spring rotation plan to achieve the six week first round target.

Urea applications are due to start over the last week of July on around 25% of the farm at 60 kg/ha and then will be applied behind the milkers and as wintered paddocks come available at 100 kg/ha from early August onwards until at least one round of the farm has been done.