On Thursday Drought has left farms short on fodder
ADRY week has seen me out mowing the last grass crops of the season. Some was second cut, which – for the want of bagged nitrogen and moisture – has taken a long time to come back.
Most was first cut in a very dry parish, which we abandoned as ‘not worth mowing yet’ at midsummer. I was ambitiously thinking a few thundershowers would soon freshen it up, and we’d be back into it in July… ha! That didn’t go as planned did it? In both cases, I was only just getting the mower under the green shoots which have finally reappeared, albeit some had the benefit of some dead seed heads to help hold the swath together. It was like mowing very big lawns, only yielding up 2-3 bales to the acre.
I’d never bother with such fiddling crops as a rule, as the maths don’t stack up very well. But I daren’t have left it to grow on for a few more weeks – indeed, much of it wasn’t really growing away anyway. I didn’t want to run the risk of wet weather properly returning, and making these bales disgusting soggy dumplings, or worse, simply unbaleable. I’ve played that game…trying to sal
vage late silage from muddy miserable conditions… it’s no fun at all. Further, if I cut much later, I wouldn’t have any regrowth where I need to be wintering ewe lambs, and tupping some inbye sheep. Hopefully scalping it now, in kind conditions, will stimulate a bit of a bite for these sheep. And the 110 round bales will feed half a score of my hungry cows.
Such are the nuts and bolts of peasant livestock farming. And while it mightn’t be of much interest to anyone else, these are the trickling little pebbles at the top of the coming landslide. By chance, I’ve had to cull out a number of my suckler cows – due to Neospora infection from dog or fox muck. So my numbers are already about 15% lower than I’d normally be carrying. Otherwise, I’d have to be taking some hard choices about what to get rid of, selling them into a ‘difficult’ market. ‘Difficult’ because unsurprisingly, it isn’t only me looking carefully at my fodder stocks, and not much liking the volume I see.
I’m hearing repeated stories amongst my peers of men who’ve been feeding cattle all summer, already having eaten most of their conserved winter fodder, and now don’t know what to do. Some are farming their way through it, sowing optimistic catch crops of brassicas, culling harder than normal, and incorporating more straw in the cow’s diet to make up some volume – for reasons I can’t quite get a hold on, there is at least an ample supply of barley straw in arable areas.
The same is true of the sheep trade, where vast areas of the country have got a shortfall of grass now, and don’t want to be buying store lambs off the hills, or replenishing in-country ewe flocks. My cheviot lambs were £10 a head down on the year, and it looks like the draft ewes will be more like £15 back. It’s a bitter irony that the lambs are the fittest bunch I’ve reared for some years.
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Amongst these testing times, I wasn’t exactly pleased to hear chirpy Steve Wright on the radio in my baler tractor, blithely assuring me that the methane from my cows was equal to all the pollution from the nation’s cars. Because while this ‘factoid’ might – or might not – stack up if you count all such gases the same, it’s hardly a fair or reasonable comparison is it? My cows burp hydrogen and carbon in a very short loop, as part of a pre-existing natural cycle. Ruminants were doing this long before we started drilling for oil and burning hydro-carbons which are hundreds of millions of years old, which releases all kinds of much nastier fumes and odours. As they say, if you don’t accept this try spending a few hours in a confined space with a couple of cudding loafing cows, then try the same with a running car. The former would leave you fit and well, possibly developing an abiding love of cows. The latter would, admittedly, take away all of your cares and worries.
I consider it’s not only extremely disingenuous of ‘Wrighty’ to make such comparisons, reinforcing the lunatic concept that we can go on burning fossil fuels if we only get rid of those nasty cows… but it’s also hurtful. It’s damaging both my community’s mental welfare, and our standing in the wider society. And that’s wrong Steve. It’s dishonourable. You should apologise, lest you get remembered for the wrong reasons.