With cattle housed from last August, slurry tanks were under severe pressure on a lot of farms, but the opportunity is now available to get some spread.

A lot of ground is just trafficable, but if you stood too long in the one place at the minute, you’d be liable to get knocked down by a fast-moving slurry tanker!

I’ve the contractor booked for this coming week, so hopefully the snow holds off. I’ve been trying to get as much slurry out in the springtime as possible for the past 10 or 12 years, instead of the traditional method of spreading it after first-cut silage.

I still target slurry on silage ground, but find getting it on early in the spring gives a useful injection of P and K and helps to kickstart grass growth, as well as help to repair damaged plants and swards.

Nitrogen losses

There is also less risk of losing nitrogen from slurry applied in spring as the weather is cooler, with less sunshine and there is more moisture in the ground.

I’m lucky in so far as my contractor works with an umbilical pipeline system with a trailing shoe attached. I couldn’t praise the system enough!

While the pipeline on its own is very easy on ground compared with a tanker, the addition of the trailing shoe means that virtually no nitrogen is lost, as well as the added benefit of being able to spread slurry on ground with a reasonable cover without dirtying the grass.

In the past, I’ve spread slurry with the tanker and splash plate on land away from the yard or maybe across a main road that wasn’t easily accessible with the pipeline on the same day as fields around the yard were spread with the pipeline and trailing shoe.

The fields spread with the trailing shoe grew considerably more grass and were able to be grazed at least two weeks earlier as the grass was not contaminated.

Some 23 units of urea along with the slurry gives a good dose of N, P and K and is ideal for pushing spring growth.

I’ve only just managed to get my calves out by day in the last week, as the land was just too wet. They are still only creeping out to a small paddock beside the shed, so they aren’t really getting much grass yet. But the health benefits of getting them out of the shed cannot be overestimated.

As soon as I get them trained to the electric fence, which will hopefully be this week, I will move them on out to a good field of grass beside the shed that has been closed from early October.

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