Farmer Writes: from too much grass to not enough

If you had of asked me three weeks ago, I’d have told you I had too much grass, which I had.

But the constant low temperatures have quickly done away with that particular problem. I took out four acres of grass two weeks ago that was too strong to graze. That was the correct decision at the time and still is.

There are five acres in this particular field and I had tried grazing it.

After about an acre of strip grazing, I realised that I was just wasting my time. I was grazing it with Friesian heifers and they were tramping as much are they were eating and weren’t particularly happy either. Trying to graze grass like that is doing neither man, beast nor land any good. Cattle won’t thrive on it, regrowth will be slow and unless it is topped the quality of the regrowth will also be poor.

So, I took the decision to mow this particular field and bale it.

Good quality

I got 34 bales from the remaining four acres and it should be very good quality stuff, which is always useful. But the way the temperatures and growth rates have dropped since, I may need these bales a lot sooner than I was bargaining for.

The red clover silage that was cut a month ago is doing well but is easily three weeks off cutting again, the after grass from the main crop silage that was cut three weeks ago however, is very slow to come back.

All my slurry was spread in the spring, which meant I had none left to apply after first-cut silage, not a huge issue as I will top up my P and K with some 18-6-12, but seeing as I had oceans of grass three weeks ago, I was in no huge panic to get the fertiliser on.

It’s a bit of a guessing game trying to spread fertiliser on recently cut silage ground, so I was waiting on things to green up a little first so I could see where I was going.

That, coupled with the recent poor growing conditions, meant that if I were to start grazing my after grass now, it would stand very little.

In hindsight, I probably should have asked my contractor to spread the fertiliser straight away using the GPS, but as they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

There is plenty of rain falling as well as the cold temperatures, leaving ground sticky enough in places. This incoming week is looking drier at the moment, although no great increase in temperatures. This time last year I was making hay, but as my father used to say “no two years are the same”. He also used to say “there’s bound to come a bit of weather sometime”. Let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later!