Two Way Grazing During Training Period
Heritage Farm
Future Dairy Group,
Our new dairy is nearing completion and we will be training 100 fresh calved cows in our two robots next month. Our 90 Autumn calving cows will continue to be milked in our old shed on leased land. We can’t milk the complete herd in the robots just yet due to capacity issues with the robots. Next year the herd will be down sized and we will have three grazings per day on three different raceways, but the three raceways can’t be used while we are milking these 90 Autumn calvers. Do others think it acceptable to have two way grazing on two races during the Spring until our Autumn calvers are dried off?
I hope everyone is having a good Spring, it is rather wet here in South Auckland NZ.
Kind regards
Cathy Yates
Kendra Kerrisk
Dear Cathy
Sorry it has taken me some time to respond to your question.
Definitely we know the system can operate with just two way grazing – in fact that is how our system always operates. We also acknowledge that it seems very apparent that three way grazing is better.
I think you will be fine to go with the two way grazing for your 100 fresh calved spring cows. The challenge during the training period is giving the cows more and smaller allocations of feed so that they run out of pasture regularly and learn to move around the system in search of more feed – this obviously is harder to do with two way vs. three way. It would be interesting to get comment from someone who has been involved with one of the South Island farms. I don’t recall which farm it was but one of them was operating the system with two breaks a day but each of those was split into two – so half of the first break was opened up and then about 6 hours later the second half opened up, 6 hours later the first half of the 2 break became available and then 6 hours later the second half of the second break was opened (hope this makes sense). I understand that the results they saw from this practice were some improvement on strictly two way grazing. Maybe one of the Jenny’s could comment.
Of course the problem with training cows in early lactation is that you need to get them up and running as quickly as possible otherwise the impact on the whole of the first lactation will be larger than desirable. The advantage however, is that cows in early lactation are very motivated and driven with a strong appetite. Just make sure things are monitored closely so that any cows that are struggling receive the attention they require.
Best of luck, must not be long now until you start the machines up.
Kind Regards
Kendra
Dr
KENDRA KERRISK | AMS Research Leader
Department of Veterinary Science | FutureDairy
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