Grazing 2024: A cool, damp summer favours swedes and clover

Beef and sheep farmer John Ritchie, winner of Farmers Weekly’s Grassland Manager of the Year 2023, replaced set stocking with rotational grazing on his Perthshire hill farm.

He is sharing updates about his 2024 grazing season.

In the third of the series, he reveals it’s been an “average” grass growing year.

See also: Bumper grass growth but wet conditions hamper utilisation

How has your summer been so far?

Cool and damp. It’s not been terrible weather, more like slightly frustrating. We’ve not had masses of rain, it’s just been annoying for silaging.

We had one weekend that got to about 24C, but otherwise we have been sitting at 15-16C daytime temperatures.

What effect has this had on grass growth?

Very static. Our unfertilised grass growth has varied between 40kg dry matter (DM)/ha a day and 60kg DM/ha a day and we’re currently at 50kg.

When I tested it in July it was 17% crude protein and 11.2MJ/kg DM metabolisable energy.

Reseeds have been good and clean – not masses of weeds. It’s been a very average year – nothing to complain about.

What happened to silage production?

We were late with first cut on 3 June due to ground conditions: we had a very wet end to May/start of June. Second cut was on 14 July, which was surprisingly OK yield-wise.

Nothing fancy, but looks good quality. Silage yields have been average, but we have plenty.

How has the weather affected grazing?

We have enough grass and are in no panic to get rid of stock. The plan is to finish all lambs off grass and as our average farm cover is down, quality is up.

Paddocks have stopped going to seed and clover has been amazing. It seems to have enjoyed the conditions and exploded.

What happened after early-season poaching?

We lost about 5% production on one or two paddocks. But ground conditions have been pretty good since the second week of June.

We are grazing everything on a leader-follower basis now – sheep and lambs followed by cattle, mainly eating leaf. We are about to wean ewes. Those at condition score 3 and above go on to the hill.

This is 80ha (198 acres) effective grazing. Lean ewes stay on good grass and after four weeks we cull those that are still poor.

We set stock on the hill, so this removes pressure on the grazing platform. We are on a 30-day rotation and trying to clean out swards to 1,600kg DM/ha, so we get good-quality growth for autumn grazing.

We’ve cut about 20ha (49 acres) with the mower to reset residuals. This is more for annual weeds, such as thistles, but that’s normal for us.

Tell us about nutrient policy

We’re busy spreading lime at this time of year. We try to get 120t/year on after silage for maintenance; it works out at 0.3t/acre (0.75t/ha). We base it on soil test results and also like to put lime in front of a fodder crop.

Because we’re high up, water removes a lot of nutrients from our light, loamy soils over rock. Our target pH is 6.5. We always used to be firefighting and would see pH levels down to 5.5.

Since I bought my own lime spreader seven years ago, and stick to a regular maintenance schedule, it’s not gone below pH 5.9. We budget for lime every year.

We still haven’t used fertiliser on the grazing platform this year. It’s hard to quantify, but I reckon raising pH to 6.5 is worth an extra 1t DM/ha, which equates to 8t/year on our farm.

We’ll be putting phosphorus and potassium on silage ground soon, as soil testing showed indexes at 1.5.

Average farm cover in mid-August usually sits at 2,600kg DM/ha. I’ll put nitrogen on then if we are behind for grazing in the back end. We start to close up in the first week of October for March 2025 grazing.

How do you manage clover?

Growing and finishing cattle like it on red clover leys. Lambs are weaned at 105 days onto red clover aftermaths (50:50 grass to clover).

We hope to get 250-300g/day growth on these and should get them all finished by winter.

To avoid bloat, we don’t put empty lambs onto clover: they fill up on leafy grass leys till about tea-time, then graze the clover leys for 12 hours and we take them off again.

Cattle can be trickier, though they only have 10% clover inclusion.

How are the swedes doing?

Our swedes have liked this cool, damp weather. We had to re-do 0.8ha (2 acres) out of the 8ha (20 acres) we drilled. It was wet when we sowed, then we got 70mm of rain on heavy land so the seeds rotted.

We have re-drilled with stubble neeps.

The rest of the field is light and rocky and so we have a reasonable crop. Cows will be on this for wintering. We start feeding it at the end of October when we wean calves.

Cows go onto a daily allocation plus about 20-30% of their diet as straw. We want fit cows going into winter and this is just enough for maintenance plus a bit, to get them to January.

What’s been your biggest challenge this summer?

It’s not been too challenging – things are pretty good!