REPS

Fertiliser for the farm

Merchants yards are filled with ‘fosset' or fertiliser. Soon it will move onto farms. Here it will provide the basic essential nutrients for our food industry. Our clean environment is important to the consumers of this industry. Let's start the season right!

Nitrogen

Teagasc advice is to apply Nitrogen six weeks before grass is required. Thus in mild areas where early grazing is possible, Nitrogen may be applied from mid-January to early February. In colder northern or hill land areas, the first application may be delayed until late March.

Precautions

As well as avoiding wet or waterlogged soils, no fertiliser should be applied if heavy rain is forecast in the next 48 hours. There is a higher risk of loss with higher application rates. Urea is ideal for these early applications.

REPS Research

In the REPS grassland research at Solohead in Tipperary, the aim is to make best use of the restricted fertiliser level allowed under REPS. Fertiliser Nitrogen is not applied until mid-March. The response is generally higher from St. Patrick's Day onwards.

Solohead programme

Slurry applied in late January or February efficiently replaces fertiliser Nitrogen. Dirty water or dilute slurry is ideal. The response is better when slurry is fairly dilute. Average growth rates from 20 December to 14 February were 7 kg DM per hectare per day.

First fertiliser application in mid-March will be half a bag of urea per acre (28 kgs N per hectare) to both the grazing and silage areas. It is intended to graze the whole farm during the spring. The swards at Solohead contain reasonably good grass and white clover.

We will follow progress during the year.