AN AFTERNOONS WORK MADE EASY!!! Silage, as some of you may refer to it as s!#t!! This to us as farmers is not the case! Silage is responsible for feeding our cows for approx 6 months of the year! To do this is not a matter of just cutting some grass and storing it for a while, there is more of an art or exact science to it! Taking years to plan Silage is a pretty good way to describe it! Grass to us farmers is not just grass, with lots of different varieties to choose from as certain grasses yield and perform so differently!! So lets say I have decided which fields we will use for this silage season. Fertiliser will be ordered by Xmas usually to hopefully get the better prices!! We then like to shut all the stock off these fields by February to give them a chance to start recovering and ready to grow again! Soil samples will be took of some fields to advise us what nutrients they are short of or perhaps too high on! Mid to late march(weather permitting) we will apply the fertiliser. Then any fields that may of been poached by the stock in winter or have been slightly damaged by machinery at some point, we will roll these with a heavy roller(ever seen the stripes in the fields) Then when the fertiliser has been utilised by the grass we can get to cutting it at the end of May or early june( again weather permitting) usually we have to prepare(clean) the clamp where we store the Silage before the contractors come!! So the contractors will come with the mowers and cut all the grass and leave it in 10ft wide rows for approx 24hrs to wilt(dry out) as this grass is lush and will be too acidic when the cows come to feed of if in winter! Then its raked up and we will have a 30 ft row of grass ready for the forage harvester! So 4 trailer drivers at the ready to be filled by this Brut of a machine which basically makes 2ft long grass into 2-3 inches long! We then take it back to the clamp and tipped out! The man on the clamp pushes the grass up and is spreading it out evenly across the top of the clamp and rolling it in with the tractor to compact it! Once this is all in and compacted we put a polythene sheet over the top and cover it in tyres that act as a weight to stop the sheet from blowing away!! A sample of this is then took for analysis, approx 7 weeks after being made, we can then work out a ration to be fed to our cows in the winter months to ensure they are received the correct energy levels to produce milk and get back in calf quickly!!
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 22:19:43 +0000
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