Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

I've been eyeing up this largely scrub feild at the bottom of my farm for the last 20yrs, just for the views, finally managed to get some sort of lease on it and milkers across to it.

Under 6500l, so 92kg per cow puts me bang on the 250 kg/ha limit at my current land, the hope is I'll get maps on the likes of above lol, I'm looking at leasing more land next yr anyways, given the fertilizer situation, and operate at a lower input system for the year, depends on how the winter goes also, got a big bank of fodder the second but that can go fast if its a wet spring.

Big changes starting to finally happen in the farming scene I feel. Younger population of farmer's son and daughters are educated and have no interest in manual work or manual work with unknown wages.

Hopefully next year I might be in a similar situation with possibly new land leased.

The best of luck with it.

Eye here is always on the organic option but you do need the acres to even think about that.

Its 6500kg, so must be under 6300L to stay below it. More or less the same as yourself here, but just below it with a young herd, too close for comfort so gonna work off the 106 planning ahead

Temporary fence across it, with no shock or anything lol, no real cliffs, overgrown bank so unlikely the cows would wander down. I could put heifers etc there instead, but they absolutely would find their way down ha, so 3 grazings with the milkers the easy way out. Round towers are the 2 Wicklow lighthouses.

@mahoney_j

Noting has been signed of yet by Europe, to be honest farmers just need to be showing the same level of compliance to the more onerous regulations been brought in as Irish water do re discharging waste water/sewage into waterways, the EU have banned this since 2002, why does a dairy farmer have to comply within months of new regulations been drafted in, and a semi-state/government bodies get 20 odd plus years

Lack of funding needs to be the new message from farmers too, just nicely worded that due to loans drew down to be compliant with the current nitrate regulations, my financial institution doesn't currently see that said farmer is in the position to take on any more debt as meeting repayments and interest on current borrowings plus drawing a living wage and taking into account hyper-inflation re inputs any more new borrowings would leave the farming business in a precarious financial position

With the cost of living sky-rocketing in alot of cases where the partners wage would be keeping the house/food on the table, its not going to stretch to the above going forward, its a perfect storm in alot of ways

I know. Listening to David mc Williams podcast during the week about civilizations that went extinct. The one thing that they all had in common was that they ran out of food to sustain themselves.

David Montgomery had the same spiel in his books. Civilisations settled on the most fertile ground. Cities developed and ground all around was tilled every year for crops. Through tillage the ground went from the most fertile to degraded and spent.

The only civilisation that overcame that was the Egyptians with the Nile bursting its banks every year and bringing nutrients from Ethiopia onto the floodplains. Didn't end well for them when Rome eyed up that farmland and took over Egypt to ensure their own people were fed.

On a smaller scale is can see it across the road from me. A farmer bought land and put it all in grass. Half was (waste) fallow for donkeys years. Half was in continuous tillage set on conacre. The Half that was in tillage the grass reseed is yellow lacking nutrients. The Half that was fallow the grass was/is bursting over the ditches.

David Montgomery had it that tillage was behind the American dream. It started on the east coast and as the farmers land became degraded they moved west and needing more and more acres till the west coast was reached. The later emigrants moving into the Eastern States met with degraded land started dairying to make the best of it.

It doesn't sit well with me at all. Any farmer should be prioritising soil health and life.

If a concession be made though min till is the best of a bad lot. But you won't get the stability of a grass sod.

The future does look like any near intensive grassland farmer will need a min till seed drill for mss. Forget grant aid on fert spreaders, grant aid should be on seeders. Irish manufacturers look to be behind the curve on their development. We're exporting balers to nz and importing seeders.

Sow with a single pass with the disc harrow, after cutting or grazing the existing grass sward very tight, and then graze at a cover of 800 next rotation to give the mss a chance to establish. 2kg plantain 2kg chicory, and either 1 or 2kg clover (2 if no clover already). Sometimes the mss can be slow to take off, 4 or 5 months, and you might think its failed, but then it hits in hard. Loads of watery slurry, but no bag nitrogen across that time.

That's what seemed to work for one organic chap I was down with afew weeks back, going to give the likes of 15ac a month a go here next year.

I get about 10% of the cows lame this time of the year. Is this normal with the rest of you. I think it's from their hooves softening due to the low DM grass. Maybe I should have started buffering sooner. I must put down more concrete outside the parlour yard too as it's a hole of sh1t this time of year. Scanned the cows during the week. Very good results. About 5% empty and they are all culls (bar 1) that I was trying to keep the bull away from anyway. Will take out alot of lower performers this year but I find it hard to get the value of them sometimes. Looking forward to drying them of in December.

No roundup. You'd defo want to get rid of as many docks or chickweed beforehand, because any spray for them afterwards will hit the mss also. How persistent all these will be is still the million dollar question, but a low cost establishment like this is a game changer, My previous problem with mss was it needed to be a full reseed, and its an expensive seed at full rate, with no real proven results yet, so I definitely couldn't stomach that risk. Obviously your going to lose growth while there is no bag N out during the time it takes for the MSS to establish properly, but given the price of N next year its the perfect time to try this, and if you have to go again every 2 or 3 yrs with another run of the disc Harrow it's not end of the world.