Silage has been on my mind quite a lot this past month or so, and for various reasons.
As always, it possibly pays not to overthink some farming issues or you can end up more confused than ever.
Looking back at the 2022 growing season, I was pleasantly surprised when yields of baled grass far exceeded expectation.
Minimal amounts (less than two bags per acre) of 24-0-13 had been applied to silage swards, but this somehow translated into an average of about 11 bales per acre of high dry matter grass.
I put this down to exceptional growing conditions, and I reckoned at the time, I could celebrate some sort of offset from the hike in fertiliser prices.
Later in the year came the sting in the tail, with a silage analysis that suggested I had made bigger crops of fairly low-quality material. However, the voice of experience also told me that high dry matter silage tended to perform better when fed to livestock than chemical analysis predicted.
Pre-lambing
Ewes were fed silage from early December through to lambing, with meal feeding being introduced at six weeks pre-lambing.
However, regular handling of the sheep told me they held body condition till mid-January, despite wet weather and poor field conditions.
This was slightly surprising because in the past, certain types of silage bales have hugely underperformed, especially lower dry matter samples with a supposed high energy content. I remain convinced that dry matter percentage is absolutely crucial when feeding baled silage to pregnant ewes. I am equally certain that clamp silage is a different ballgame altogether. Don’t ask me to explain – I can’t.
Heifers
An even bigger (and very pleasant) surprise hit me when we weighed a pen of the young dairy heifers. Normally, I would start them after housing on more than 2kg of meal, then very gradually reduce it over the following months to 1kg.
But this year was not the same. Meal is £400/t, and I was selling surplus bales of silage at £30 each.
Over the years, I’ve had plenty of pleasant shocks when weighing cattle at grass
By using this valuation as a cost guide, then adding concentrate at 40 p/kg, I discovered to my horror that the rearing fee was barely covering the money being fired down their throats. Therefore, they were put on a slightly less salubrious diet, and I dreaded the day when the weighbridge would shame me forever.
Gain
But according to the scales, they gained almost 0.5kg daily, which is well ahead of what I had expected (0.25kg to 0.3kg), and this represents one of the few times in my life when the performance of housed cattle exceeded expectation.
Over the years, I’ve had plenty of pleasant shocks when weighing cattle at grass, but weighing animals off slats has been a consistently disappointing experience.
Particularly so when I used to buy quality weanlings from the suckler herd, when it wasn’t unusual to feed them over 2kg of meal along with good-quality silage, only to be rewarded with a daily liveweight gain for the entire winter of barely 0.4kg.
The only upside was they tended to respond in a spectacular fashion when turned out to grass and I learned to love the phenomenon that is compensatory growth.
For the year ahead, I’ll stick to the plan for higher dry matter bales. It’s unlikely that we’ll see a repeat of last spring’s incredible growth conditions, so maybe yields will be back to my predicted eight bales per acre.
This year’s plan involves a light grazing with sheep, followed by two bags per acre of a suitable fertiliser, then glorious sunshine in early June to ensure dry leafy grass is made into quality fodder for next winter. Nothing can possibly go wrong, can it?