Like a lot of farmers across the country, I have been caught out by the recent spell of broken weather.

You might imagine that a wet fortnight in early June wouldn’t cause too much hassle for the agricultural community, but it has had a hugely negative effect for anyone baling silage.

The winners seem to be some dairy farmers because their gap between first and second cuts straddled the damp conditions very nicely.

For all those people like me who conserve their grass during late May and early June, it has been a different story altogether.

My silage areas are grazed with sheep and while some fields have stock removed at the end of January, other bits are grazed with sheep and lambs till late April.

Therefore, the first half of my acreage was ready for mowing on 26 May and averaged 10 bales per acre.

It was cut during sunny, warm weather, so the tedder and wuffler remained in hibernation and bales were stacked in the silo. So far, so good, except the next few fields needed another week or so just to bulk up and fully utilise whatever nitrogen was left in the grass.

As the swards filled out (you could nearly see them increasing every day), I watched the weather forecast and reckoned, weather permitting, they would mow around 4 June.

However, with rain falling every day that turned into 12th of the month and while a bit of bulk is comforting in terms of bale numbers, quality had noticeably declined.

Dry matter

My response to this more stemmy grass was to extricate the tedder from the shed and spread the grass twice. If quality was going to be sacrificed, then I could at least increase the dry matter and hope for higher intakes that way.

I would have dropped all the grass at this stage but my contractor, like everyone else in that business, was snowed under with people begging him to come to them.

We settled for two fields at home and planned to do more at the rented farm when the pressure had eased slightly.

Low quality

It was 16 June before we got more cut and it is a four-acre field of potentially the lowest quality fodder I have made in years.

It is an earlier type of ryegrass sward, devoid of clover, that was poorly grazed by Hereford bullocks for a fortnight in the spring.

It sort of fell between two stools (this is an alternate narrative to saying I messed up in a big way) and received late fertiliser which translated into a field of shot grass with no green bottom.

When feeding it out, I’ll probably resort to using descriptive terms like ‘right stuff’, ‘traditional silage’, or even, ‘Boy it would surprise ye, they quarely knock it intae them’. These are euphemisms for material that will be nothing more than belly fill, or as they say here in Killinchy, ‘pure gorbage’.

Reminder

This unfortunately timed spell of wet weather has reminded me (again) of one thing.

Young, highly productive ryegrass swards are undoubtedly capable of yielding huge quantities of quality silage.

But if unsuitable conditions prevail, they switch from leaf to stem in a very short space of time.

And when you are making bales, where dry matter is far more important (vital even) than when making clamp silage, then these swards become something of a liability.

By contrast, older swards (20 years or more) may not grow as rapidly, or come away as quickly in the spring, but their great advantage is that they always maintain a thick, green bottom in the sward.

And when you ted out some of these low-lying, dense mats of grass, it is full of fine leafy material that pregnant sheep love to eat.

I am not an advocate of backward-looking farming, but I do know that, over the years, it has been some of my older fields of worn grass that has allowed me to make quite palatable winter fodder after periods of broken weather.

I suspect I may be selective when it comes to analysing bales in the winter; sometimes it’s best to pretend everything is just hunky dory.