Winter isn’t just a season to “get through”—it is a critical window for heifer development. Consistent management during these colder months ensures your calves and heifers hit their growth targets, setting them up for a successful mating period in the spring.
As autumn winds down, a robust winter plan is your best tool for success. By extending rotation lengths and fine-tuning your stocking strategy now, you can enter winter with the cover needed to weather the chill.
Strategies for Sustained Performance
To maintain pasture productivity and animal health through the transition, consider these four pillars of winter management:
- Build Your “Pasture Bank”
Longer autumn rotations are essential for building winter reserves. Increasing your rotation length prevents overgrazing during periods of slow growth, leaving more leaf area to jumpstart spring recovery.
- Supplement Early: Use supplements now to help lengthen your rounds.
- Strategic Culling: Remove lower-performing stock early to reduce demand.
- Active Rotation: Controlled grazing maximizes every square meter of farm productivity.
- Master the Feed Budget
A feed budget is a living document. Balancing supply and demand in the lead-up to winter—and adjusting it as conditions change—is the only way to avoid “feeding from the back of the truck” come July.
- Proactive Pugging Prevention
Winter weather is unpredictable, but soil damage is preventable. Protecting your soil structure today means faster growth tomorrow—remember, grass grows grass.
- Smart Mapping: Graze wetter paddocks during dry spells and save free-draining areas for the rains.
- Sacrifice Paddocks: Identify a designated area to protect the rest of your farm.
- Long-term Infrastructure: Evaluate if your farm needs further investment in drainage or contouring to handle future winters.
- Leverage Data and Technology
If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Responsive management relies on accurate data.
- Technology: Using technologies like satellite pasture cover analysis will help identify feed shortfalls or surpluses in real-time.
- Regular Re-calculation: Don’t “set and forget” your budget; update it as the winter progresses to stay ahead of the curve.
Strong Partnerships, Strong Heifers
We’ve just moved through a busy period—returning in-calf heifers to their home farms and welcoming a new intake of heifers. The feedback from our dairy farmers has been great; they are consistently impressed with the condition and quietness of the heifers returning from our growers.
These results are a testament to the care and attention given by our growers under our system. It highlights the power of our partnership: working together to ensure healthy, productive animals working to ensure they don’t just survive the winter, but thrive through it.
Pro-Tip: Ready to take the guesswork out of your pasture covers? Check out Pasture.io to see how satellite technology can simplify your pasture grazing management.
