Glanbia Monitor Farm Update – Paddy O’Gorman

With half the herd calved and 14% of the farm grazed, Paddy O’Gorman is well on track this Spring.

The O’Gorman farm is a 60 ha milking platform and Paddy is hoping to milk 180 cows this year. The average farm cover this week was 1045kg/dm/ha which is currently growing at 6kg of grass dm/ha. The cows are out full time with no silage and three kg of meal per day.

Calving

The O’Gormans are half way through calving this week with 91 cows calved. They are calving three weeks and all the cows will be calved by April 10th.

A first round of Nitrogen, which was half a bag of urea, was spread on January 19th and Paddy intends to go out with a second round of two bags of 18:6:12 per acre in 10 days’ time.

Grazing

Paddy said that he wants to have 30% grazed by the 1st of March and as they already have 14% grazed, they are on target to achieve this.

“Heifers were weighed last week and they are well on target for weights, averaging 280kg. The lighter half of the heifers are already gone out and half are still in the shed. The lighter half averaged about 265kg”.

Labour

In relation to labour, apart from himself, Paddy has a full-time student and another part-time man that covers the days that the student is off. Paddy’s father is also around to give a hand during the busy spring period.

Other efforts that are being made to reduce labour include feeding the calves as soon as they are born.

Paddy said “we will give them a chance to drink but if they don’t drink, we will stomach tube them within the first two hours. We are also night-time feeding the cows silage. They are not left out to the silage until after 5pm and with this practice we have less than 15% calving at night”.

Bull selection

On bull selection criteria, Paddy will aim to get what he wants bought before they sell out, focussing on high solids, good fertility and EBI.

First Published 16 February 2017