First cut silage is in! It’s a week later than it should be, with a little more seed heads on it than I’d like. But it's in, and all things considered, it’s in fairly good shape. It was mowed Monday of last week and wasn’t lifted until Tuesday evening. The cold scourge north wind that blew all day Tuesday, made a good job of drying the grass as well as the land. As the saying goes, “it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good". And this wind definitely helped me as my land was fairly wet after the previous week's rain. But thankfully we managed to get the crop harvested, with barely a mark on the fields.

And what a crop it was! As I’ve already said, due to the poor weather, my harvest date had been pushed back by at least a week, so obviously there was more bulk due to this, as well as the fact that there was a bay and a half of silage left from last year. But even with these things taken into consideration, the fact that there is as much silage in the pit now after one cut as there was after two cuts last year is still quite impressive.

Most people locally seem to be reporting the same thing, I’m told quite reliably, that over 300 bales came off a piece of land that only yielded 200 last year! Extremely heavy crops and silage even coming ready sooner than usual. My contractor told me that some of his clients, that usually wouldn’t cut until early July are looking for him already.

This brings its own issues with contractor availability and such and the unsettled weather only compounding the problem. Who’d be an Agri-contractor? A couple of dry days forecast, and 10 people want you at once, and you’re the worst in the world when you can’t get around everyone.

I’ve decided to invest in a couple of those green netting covers, for over the black silage cover. The ones that supposedly don’t need tyres, just the sausage bags filled with pea gravel. I priced these covers on numerous occasions in the past, but always thought them too expensive. But thankfully they have reduced quite a bit recently, in terms of cost, so I decided to bite the bullet. Anything to try to make the job of covering a silage pit a cleaner and simpler job.

Next job on the agenda is to get the slurry out and try to figure out how much ground to close for second cut.

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