Many farmers reported grass growth rates exceeding 100kg/ha/day towards the end of last week. These growth rates are more commonly seen in early May, rather than mid-June.

The fact is, grass is jumping out of the ground as all the factors are there for growth – plenty of moisture, long daylight hours, plenty of sunshine last week and warm, muggy conditions.

So on the face of it, this is good news and farmers are generally happy when grass is growing well, but it can also cause problems.

The problems, in this case, are grass quality related. Too much grass leads to too high grass covers which are lower in quality than lower covers.

Two problems

Grazing these poorer quality covers will lead to two problems. Firstly, cows eat less because it is lower in digestibility - meaning it takes longer for the grass to pass through the cow, meaning the cow feels fuller for longer.

If cows grass intake drops, then the potential for milk production also drops because you need high intakes for high milk production.

The second issue is that the quality of each kilo of grass consumed is also lower quality, meaning overall energy intakes drop which also has an impact on milk production.

Therefore, farmers need to be really proactive at taking out grass covers that have gone too strong, and they’ll only really know this by walking the farm every four or five days.

Looking at it from a cover per cow perspective, setting the figure at 150 to 160kg DM/cow for the coming days is probably sensible, if demand is say 65kg/day and growth is 90kg/day.

The thing to remember though is that these high growth rates are not sustainable, so farmers will need to remove the surplus as soon as possible to avoid a grass shortage looming in the coming weeks.

Even if the weather for this week is mixed, cutting some of these surplus paddocks will have to take priority.