Farm Diary

I called the silage contractors in to cut and cart the remaining twenty acres of grazing which was out of control as well as under water last week.

I did not want to open the silage clamp for such a small amount of grass, as it would disturb the very good silage sealed up in there, and having calculated that cutting and baling this grass would cost twice as much as carting it and dumping it in the muckheap, I decided to throw it away.

It seems a waste, but the objective here is to get the grazing fields back into the rotation, and spending extra on silage bales I don't need and can't easily incorporate into the system does not make sense.

The challenge now is to work out how many acres we are going to need out of the second cut silage acreage, as the cows are grazing the initial fields very fast due to relatively small covers, but the grass is growing rapidly, and in a week's time they will be grazing huge amounts of grass again.

The reason of course is that the silage was all cut on the same day, where as grazing is in rotation and in theory one should have the same cover in front of the cows most of the time; once grazed these extra acres will also be in the rotation.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette June 11