Dairy farmer Eugene Lawler is farming alongside his son Eoin and his family in Ballitore, Co. Kildare, where a simple grazing system is proving very effective for them.

Eugene Lawler was a new entrant into dairy in 2015 after moving from sucklers to dairy cows, and has built his herd up to be a well-balanced Holstein Friesian with a small bit of Jersey running through it to keep down size.

The dairy farmer with a real passion for cows and grass recently featured on the Agriland  'Dairy Trail' podcast. Click here to listen to the podcast.

Currently milking 150 cows, the herd is currently producing 22L/cow/day at 4.8% butterfat and 3.78% protein, while only receiving 0.4kg of concentrates/day through the parlour.

In his first few years of milking cows, Eugene admitted that they were stocked way too high on the milking platform at 3.7 cows/ha, but quickly realised that he was limiting performance and substituting with costly meal.

At this time of the year, Eugene aims to "keep quality grass in front of them [the cows], keep grass in the diet and keep the meal lorry out of the yard".

However, at a very high stocking rate, Eugene found this very hard to achieve.

He said he was grilled by Teagasc's Joe Patton and George Ramsbottom and his own Teagasc advisor, Ned Loughlin about matching his stocking rate to the farm's ability to grow grass.

Now at a stocking rate of 3.1 cows/ha, Eugene admits that it allows for more grass gowth and more grass in the diet.

The dairy farmer said that "I wasn't happy with cow performance based on their EBI", as the cows were not living up to their genetic potential for fat, protein, and litres.

One of the tweaks that was also made to the system was moving away from allocating 18kg DM of grass/cow during the peak grazing months to allocating 20kg of grass DM/cow to ensure an intake of about 18-19kg DM/cow.

Even when Eugene was feeding extra meal to make up being overstocked and limiting intakes, he admitted that "we weren't even putting in the meal that should've been substituted which was hampering performance".

Eugene changed his paddock system as well - he originally had about 23-24 paddocks on the farm with 24-hour grazing allocations in each.

Thanks to the advice he got, he changed his system to a 16 paddock platform, moving from a 24-hour allocation to a 36-hour allocation, which ensured higher grass intakes and cow performance.

He said that, with the 26-hour allocation: "The cows are pinched twice every three days instead of once every day".

This essentially meant that Eugene went from 2ha paddocks to 3ha paddocks and said "basically, we took out every second wire", and he told Agriland that he plans to add more drinkers to these paddocks to make them "more adaptable at time of strong growth".

The calculation for Eugene's paddocks is as follows: 150 cows x 19kg DM/cow allocation x 1.5 days = 4,275 ÷ a pre grazing cover of 1,400kg DM/ha = 3ha.

Making these simple tweak to his grazing platform has made a huge difference for the Lawlers and Eugene added that "where we seen it was in the bulk tank."

Eugene always aims for the target of 500kg of milk solids/cow/year and has been hitting that target for the last number of years, except for 2024 where - due to weather and conditions - the cows produced 480kg/milk solids/cow/year.