It’s the time of year to be thinking about forage crops on farms, including factors such as the varieties and costs of growing these crops. There are plenty of options out there to get high-energy crops into diets or to bulk up feed stocks and find land to send lighter animals to over the winter.

The focus this week is on maize and beet, but crops like kale and later-sown crops like forage rape and stubble turnips are also really good options on farms and are fast-growing. Some farmers are also fans of triticale for whole crop and while the time has passed for planting that now, there may be opportunities to approach a tillage farmer about whole-cropping cereals.

Forage crops provide an ideal opportunity for livestock and tillage farmers to work together. As farms become more specialised, so do skillsets and so it may make sense for a livestock farmer to ask a tillage farmer to grow a crop.

In the same way it would make sense for a specialised tillage farmer to ask a livestock farmer to graze their cover crops to bring livestock into the system. This of course can also free up land, which may otherwise need to be rented for a year and could help to solve a major issue for all sectors at present.

It may also bring about an opportunity for slurry to be exported to a tillage farm.

This could transfer slurry from a highly stocked farm and keeping it off the same block of land may help to improve water quality.