Farmer Writes: the trials of dairy farming

I am trying to go green, but the grass is going brown. I spent last week in Cornwall and was incredibly envious of their second cut Westerwold grass – welly high (up to their knees). I came home and my grazing ground could hardly cover my toes.

The cows are back on full winter rations, grass silage, brewers’ grains and cake in the parlour to yield.

This is all very disappointing, due to the first three months of the year being too wet to graze – I did try but have a lot of rejuvenation to do on the pastures. It’s now too dry and I’m losing another month’s grazing. We’ve just started calving the autumn block and we have to look after these.

Only very few made good silage this year, due to having to go late. I think the only ones who get any milk from silage will be those who cut every four weeks, if they could.

The young stock are on supplementary feeding. All this makes milk production more expensive but with milk supplies already tightening and many dairy farmers throwing the towel in, the milk price will have to rise.

Desktop management

The desktop management from Westminster still continues to alarm me.

I spoke to one farmer yesterday who put his 800 arable acres into a wild flower mix and doesn’t have to do anything to it. For this, he gets a very profitable grant. It certainly beats arable farming with the current wheat price.

He was fortunate because there was such an uptake of the scheme, a fortnight later the powers that be decided you could only put this mix on 25% of your farm.

The other mad scheme is paying farmers not to cut until July. This has produced such a plethora of weeds, thistle, docks and ragwort, all going to seed - the weed infestation of these pastures next year will be tremendous.

Badgers

We waited with great anticipation for the Brian May documentary on the BBC. I was surprised and disappointed with the derogatory comments made before the programme was even aired. “He’s just a pop star, what would he know about it?”

Brian has shown considerable insight into realising that slagging off farmers was getting nowhere and he very sensibly decided to work with farmers, not against them, assisted by Dick Sibley who can be described as no ordinary vet.

He has spent a large amount of money on researching the problem and producing this programme of some facts together with some opinions, but he has opened up a whole area of thought that needs investigating. Tunnel vision will not solve the TB problem. We have to be a church of many faiths.

I was a little alarmed at the beginning of the programme showing pictures of cuddly badgers and wondered if we were going to get a lopsided view, but he went on to show a farmer in tears watching his cow being shot and the impact of all this on the farming community.

I just hope that those who are representing farmers to a Government who may be tempted to bring out new policies, will be sensitive rather than aggressive.

As in life, every force is met by an equally opposite opposing force.

P.S. I have just read that the Government intends to cease badger culling in five years time. I so hope that this is a scientific, well researched action, not emotive opinion based.