The fine weather lately has given me the opportunity to remove surplus grass from the grazing rotations. Silage season has begun.

The kids, especially Drew, have been in their element watching the machinery in action. Some things never change over the years, as like many of us, I loved watching the silage being harvested as a child. The smell of freshly mown grass and the roar of tractors as they hauled grass back to the yard were every little boy’s dream. Watching with amazement as the silage was backed up on to the pit and just itching to be allowed on a tractor to be part of it all.

Though the excitement and sense of wonderment for children is still there, what has changed is the size of all the machinery and the speed at which they now travel. What used to take a couple of days now only takes a few hours and is definitely not a place for children to be.

With any luck, this will help get the rotations back on track and should produce some high-quality silage for next winter. I will hopefully get another bit of silage harvested this week from the fields which were closed up in late April or early May.

As I want to make high-quality silage, I don’t want to delay in cutting this. In order to get high DMD silage, I need to harvest at or just before seed heads emerge.

With DMD dropping by one unit for every three days delay in harvesting after that point, it doesn’t take long for quality to drop rapidly. This delay in cutting also slows down the recovery of grass after harvest. The field may not have a good cover of after-grass available for grazing with lambs when they are weaned in a few weeks’ time. Hopefully the weather will hold and I manage to get the best out of my fields.

Faecal egg count

Speaking of lambs, I have just started to send away faecal egg count samples to the lab to monitor how worm burdens are in the different groups. I will be sending samples away on a fortnightly basis from now on. I have found this process very beneficial in reducing the amount of anthelmintic used on the farm, as I am only dosing the groups of lambs that have a worm burden. The others are left untreated until such time as they require a dose.

This is beneficial in two ways; firstly it reduces costs and secondly it is reducing the chance of anthelmintic resistance developing when used in conjunction with a proper dosing strategy. The arrival of the bovine lodgers next week will also help reduce worm burden.