Last August, the Irish Farmers Journal visited a farmer in Co Roscommon who had recently purchased 16 acres of land adjoining his own farm.

The land was not in great shape and needed considerable work. It was all in one block and there were no internal fences, making it difficult to carry out proper rotational grazing. Part of the land was very wet and low-lying, while another part of the land contained a considerable hill that was very steep. Work started in mid-August and here is what has been done to date.

Pictures one and two

Picture one gives the best perspective of the land as it was when the farmer bought it. It highlights the low-lying land in the foreground and the hill in the background. Considerable work was carried out and picture two shows the progress that has been made since.

Firstly, the farmer brought in suckler cows to graze off the rough grass. He then got a tractor and mulcher in and cleaned off the remaining stem, rushes and flaggers.

A local digger contractor, cleaned out the original open drains, as well as laying the hedges in the centre of the block and around the perimeter.

He also dug out a main shore extending from the back of the hill all the way to the open drain, as well as collector drains to capture as much run-off as possible. A roadway was added for access to all of the paddocks.

This was important because the farm enterprise is contract-rearing and the infrastructure is needed to make it as easy as possible to move heifers from their paddock to a cattle crush for an AI service.

Pictures three and four

Picture three shows the hill before any work was carried out. It was taken over by briars and scrub. A mulcher was used to break down the scrub by driving up and down the hill and leaving behind well-shredded debris.

The digger was used to level out the steeper areas to make it easier for tractor work to be carried out in the future.

Grass seed (Abergain, Kintyre, Drumbo, Aberchoice and a clover blend) at a rate of 1.5 bags to the acre and three bags of 10:10:20 were spread per acre. Now, the hill looks better and the grass seed is producing results (picture four). When the paddocks are fully installed, the side and bottom of the hill will make up one paddock and this will help to ensure it is grazed out properly and that the scrub won’t return.

Pictures five, six and seven

Drainage made up the bulk of the cost of this reclamation job and the farmer said he thinks this is the key area to get right from the start. He said that the land is useless to him, if he can’t graze all the paddocks for the majority of the year and grass growth would be severely limited if the ground is saturated more often than it is dry.

Picture five is a prime example of how wet some areas were and how water sat just on the surface unable to go anywhere.

The digger operator said that there was a foul smell when he was cleaning the drains, which was a clear sign to him that the water was stagnant and not moving.

He moved into neighbouring land to clean out more drains to clear any obstructions and to help improve the drainage and speed up the flow of water.

The main drain was 2ft moving to 3ft deep and a 6in diameter drainage pipe was put down to collect as much water as possible. The pipe was covered in with 3in stone all the way to the surface.

A number of collector shores feed into this main drain. These shores only contained stone and are 18in to 2ft deep, depending on the ground.

The digger driver said that these will help to collect surface water and to increase the speed water soaks away in the peaty soil. Some shores were added to remove spring water as well.

Pictures eight and nine

The roadway was put in directly on top of the land using stone from the local quarry.

In total, 390 metres of roadway were put in at 10ft wide and 9in to 12in thick, with 1ft of stone in very wet parts (red rock, which compacts very well).

The roadway is ideal for moving stock and gives easy access to every paddock. In total, there will be seven paddocks installed with an average size of 2.3 acres.

The farmer is doing the fencing himself and is putting up just one strand of high-tensile wire for the internal paddocks.

A contractor is putting sheep wire around part of the perimeter to allow sheep to graze the paddocks and improve the pasture in the first few years.

He decided to go with mid-sized concrete troughs because he is planning to increase his heifer-rearing enterprise to 60 next year and he wants to be sure that they will have enough water in summer.

The troughs are quick-filling and are fed via 0.5in diameter pipe. Stone was laid around the troughs to avoid muck build up.

A breakdown of the costs is shown in Table 1.

The reclamation work was under €20,000, excluding VAT, or €1,246/acre. Drainage and roadways made up over 50% of the costs, but the farmer felt that this infrastructure was needed to ensure the farm was set up to grow grass and be accessible to cattle when needed. The farmer is not full-time and has off-farm employment, which would have had a bearing on his investment capacity. But anything he spent on the land was not extravagant and should pay dividends in the future.

Comment

Considerable work was carried out on this land to get it productive again. It’s refreshing to see land that was in a poor state being given a makeover to set it up to grow good quantities of grass and, hopefully, make a return for the farmer’s investment. It is estimated that the farm grew 2t to 3t DM/ha last year.

With a combination of rotational grazing, lime and fertiliser, the farmer should easily double this figure in 2016. Many people will argue that he should have reseeded the entire block when he was carrying out the work. However, he had planned on only spending €13,000 on the reclamation work. As he went over budget due to an increased number of shores, he decided to focus on the drainage work first and spare no expense in this area. He plans to do reseeding paddock by paddock in the coming years.