Season change

Autumn has come in with a bang thanks to storm Ali. It’s a reminder to get ready for the winter season. Have you a backup generator and is it serviced and ready to go in the event of a power cut? Are sheds ready for housing? Now is the time to fix up any gates, doors or barriers that are broken.

Be thinking ahead to next spring when cows are calving and you’re busy. What can you do now to make handling and moving animals easier? Extra gates or penning can save a lot of time when you’re busy. Water supplies were cut off during the heavy frosts last winter. Do pipes need more insulation and do you need more water storage?

You have until the end of October to spread slurry but don’t wait until land becomes too wet to travel. Don’t forget to service tractors and loaders before the heavy-use period when animals are housed.

Winter feed

At the Ploughing Championships this week, part of the fodder demonstration at the Journal stand dealt with winter feeding when silage is scarce. The point was made that if short of silage, you can’t just feed silage as normal along with extra meal and expect that cows will eat less silage. Unless silage is restricted, the cows’ overall diet will increase. The result will be fatter cows, a big meal bill and an empty silage pit.

A typical 5ft sheargrab will hold about 1.1m3 of silage, which is about 200kg of silage dry matter, depending on how dry the silage is. If you’re about 10% short of silage, then you will probably need to feed 2kg of meal per day to dry cows along with 10kg DM of silage. So one 5ft sheargrab will feed 20 cows for 24 hours along with two 20kg bags of meal. It makes a lot more sense to front-load meal feeding to the pre-Christmas period. You don’t want to be messing around with meal feeding to dry cows when you’re in the middle of calving. If this means feeding more supplement in November and December and all silage after Christmas, then so be it. Some farmers are considering buying their pre-calver mineral in the nut this year.

Metric v Imperial

Bags per acre, units per acre and cwt per acre are past their sell-by date at this stage. Fertiliser is sold in tonnes, fertiliser spreaders are calibrated in kg/ha and scientific advice is given in kg/ha. To convert kg/ha to units/acre, you multiply by 0.8. To convert units/acre to kg/ha, you divide by 0.8. Fertiliser advice on this column will now be given in kg/ha of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulphur. For example, a fertiliser recommendation of 40kg N/ha is the same as 32 units/acre of nitrogen. To work out how much product to use, divide the percentage of nitrogen in the bag into the desired rate per hectare.

For example, to spread 40kg N/ha of 46% urea, you divide 40 by 0.46, which is 87kg/ha of urea. So a 375kg bag of urea will cover 4.31 hectares. If using 27% CAN, you divide 40 by 0.27, which is 148kg/ha. So a 500kg bag of CAN will cover 3.38 hectares. Differentiate between straight N, P and K in kg/ha and the product, eg CAN, urea in kg/ha.