Change to derogation

Think you'll be taking it for real and possibly paid to do it, next year. Agree with Bass, a lot of 100 cow farmers I see are fine. Over the last years many of them reduced or eliminated the beef enterprise on their farms. This reducing stocking and reduced the amount of inorganic N applied. Those farmers also are the least in debt. IFA action is pathetic as they know the horse has bolted long ago. Excuse the pun on they picketing the Horse and Jockey.

Not a follower, but do have organic mob grazing with a 43/44 day rotation. An estimation is 0.7lu per acre. This is on old grass swards. Think it will go to 0.8lu per acre with sward improvement, on one particular field. In my case that will be a reseeding with Multi Species Sward. The MSS is a high mix of plants and varieties, similar to the original Jena Experiment. Only starting to learn.

The followers of Gabe are at 1 lu per acre. Some more.

And from Gabes own experience brought up a degraded tillage soil from 1, 2% OM to 6%.

Fair few this side of the Atlantic making a real go of it too.

Know a dairy manager in Oz going that way too. Not as easy with dairy stock though and the longer grazing intervals.

Dept of Ag figure...40% of farmers are short of slurry storage😒

Just leads to so many questions..

How come if they know that they've done ###k all about it?

How many derogation farms are short of storage? They've all signed a declaration thay they have, so why is it derigation farms targeted in this nitrates change?

That figure was from a few years ago and tbf measures have since came in to counter it.

FWIW they had us as short of storage but when they came to inspect they found that they'd completely missed counting a slatted tank which made us very "compliant", but I'm sure we're in the 40%. Same with a neighbour

What you're saying is, some guy out in America runs a very different system to us commissioner, some other guy in Australia is doing something similar to him, so can we keep our derogation?

What you need to be saying is 5000 farmers achieved X and this was the real world result. Nothing of that sort was done.

Because we don't have a domestic water charge, the EU have us in particular focus with regards to overall water quality. Believe it or not and I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

Yes, I could see 1lu/acre being achievable without inorganic fertiliser. Most of my grazed area is old permanent pasture. The milk yield or weight gain is the other part of that measure for consideration.

Could be. I remember Ella smartly saying a low figure when someone was on praising the Timoleague catchment for the progress.

Timoleague is a great example of things that can be done, but last year was an anomoly in terns of nitrates there and the numbers have rebounded this year after the dip. The key about the programme is that the levels weren't rising despite being a grassland area surrounded by many in derogation.

There was a share of stuff bought last year for this year so wouldn't bite in to that figure much. Fert reg will be more accurate in the next few years anyway

A stitch-up job by the epa with help from teagasc in simple terms.....

A housed holstein cow in the uk giving 30 plus liters of milk is calculated to produce circa 350 gallons a month our 4200 gallons of slurry a year, the epa/teagasc tested some watery lagoon slurry/dairy washings and halved the n rate in a 1000 gallons of slurry and made it a new rule re export..n

It's the one issue I cant understand farm organisations trying to get reversed its farcical

It's roughly the slurry produced by 20 cows over 52 weeks but still illogical.

The aim is probably to discourage derogation but they'll say they are adding a safety margin.