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This week should see the summer/early autumn work wrapped up, with the attention shifting to sowing the winter crops and grazing out the grass fields.
We have completed the reseeding on a field we use almost exclusively for silage. The existing sward had been down for about 12 years and the constant cutting had reduced both the clover content and the quality of the grass itself, which had become infested with docks, dandelions and a mixture of weed grasses. The field has a pH of about 7.5 but has a very poor structure if it rains so, after treating it with Roundup, we gave it several runs of a disc with crumbler bars and a nice fine tilth emerged.
We broadcast the seed with a clover that is meant to be resilient in a continuous cutting, high nitrogen regime, so after a light chain harrowing of the sown ground, the job was done. At the moment, we are taking our final cut of silage. It is all on reseeded land and looks to be of excellent quality but at the end of the day, autumn grass – whether silage or grazed – lacks the punch of a spring sward, especially for bulls.
We are gradually housing all the bulls that are 480kg or heavier. I have decided to keep enough of our own commercial feed wheat and straw to get us through to sometime next summer. If I had to buy in everything at current prices, the programme might be different.
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