Grazing outlook for 2025 – Can this be a better year?

After heavy rainfall in 2024, most farmers are looking to the 2025 grazing season with hopes of better weather to increase yields.

AHDB Strategic Dairy Farm and Forage for Knowledge contributor Keith Davis, Farm Consultant at Lydney Park Farms, is putting measures in place to help increase their dry matter yield this year. He hopes to grow an average of two extra tonnes compared with last year.

He said:

“Last year's grazing season didn’t offer us the best start with all the wet weather we had.

"The weather didn’t work in our favour, giving us a dry matter yield averaging just under 13 tonnes per hectare. That’s the lowest amount we have grown since 2018, when we had that drought year.”

The poor weather conditions meant that Lydney Park Farms, like many other farms across the UK, had to adapt their grazing.

Keith explains:

“The amount of rainfall we had in March and April meant that we grazed the entire milking platform twice during the very wet conditions.

"We ended up damaging the fields twice – which is a disaster for maintaining soil health and avoiding compaction.”

After this, the team split the herd into three groups, rotating them between being in the sheds and grazing. Each group (270 cows) grazed for eight hours at a time to take some pressure off the fields.

The housing is limited at this farm. Otherwise, they would have chosen to house the cows and just graze them for three hours a day to help the soil recover.

“We were quite pleased with the result when we did start doing that because we were getting into quite a mess on a few fields up until then.”

After the wet period last year, the weather turned dry and offered a new set of challenges to many farms.

“It was a very challenging year. The soil was very compacted and, as a result, the plant was then only living in the roots, getting down to one or two inches. This affected the amount of dry matter yield we could grow per hectare."

In the autumn, grass growth took off, and they were starting to feel more positive about this grazing season. But how can they prepare to ensure better yields in 2025?

Last year, the team at Lydney and their Strategic Dairy Farm steering group started working with Brendan Horan from Teagasc to improve farm efficiency.

Brendan helped develop a robust set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and profit targets specific to Lydney Park. They partly focused on optimising soil health and increasing dry matter yields.

Thom Washbourne, AHDB Knowledge Exchange Manager, said:

“Working with Brendan as a part of the Strategic Dairy Farm programme was important for Lydney. He helped steer them to work on areas which can have a big impact on the overall farm efficiency.”

Keith added:

“Looking at the last year and the discussions we had with Brendan, we think it is the perfect time to work on improving the soil structure, getting some air in the ground and doing some reseeds.”

Brendan’s report highlighted a few key actions to help with aerating the soil, improving overall soil health and increasing dry matter yields:

• Reseeding underproductive swards – 15% of the milking platform to be reseeded each year to perennial ryegrass and medium leaf size white clover pastures
• Total N surplus should be reduced from 168 kg/ha in 2023 to 100 kg/ha across the overall farm via the incorporation of clovers within swards, reducing concentrate use levels and crude protein contents, further improvements to soil fertility and increasing slurry use on out blocks
• The incorporation of plantain with grazing pastures and over-sowing pastures can be an effective additional measure to reduce N losses

Looking forward to the 2025 grazing season, Lydney’s team are looking to work on some of Brendan's recommendations to ensure better soil health and dry matter yield.

Keith said:

“We plan to reseed 15% of the grazing platform this year with perennial ryegrass and medium leaf size white clover.

"Last autumn, we managed to reseed approximately 10% of the milking platform, so hopefully we see an improvement in growth this spring.”

Although the farm has previously sown clover onto most of its milking platform, the team found growth to be a bit hit-and-miss, depending on each paddock.

“In about 50% of our fields, we have struggled to get the clover to establish. I don't know why it works in some and not others, but we're very pleased with the clover in the fields where it has worked. In the fields that it hasn't worked in, we'll have to try again.”

In addition to reseeding, the Lydney team plan to aerate their soils to break up some of the existing compaction and help encourage better growth from existing swards.

“We make our silage from surplus grass. Last year we made 3,400 tonnes, which is not quite enough for winter.

"We didn’t have to buy any, but we did have to go into the previous year’s surplus.

"Ideally, we need 4,000 tonnes of silage over winter, so we would like to achieve that this year.”

This year, they hope to achieve 14 tonnes of dry matter per hectare and then aim for 16 tonnes in a couple of years, once more of the farm has been reseeded.