Farmer Focus: Dairy and arable integration paves the way
© Charlie Cheyney With Christmas done and the cold snap waning here in Hampshire, attention has turned to ordering seed and fertiliser for spring cropping.
For us, with the dairy, this will be spring barley and maize.
Uncertainty within markets has highlighted our need to become more integrated so we can insulate ourselves from market volatility as much as possible.
See also: Dairy herd helps achieve good arable soils and low inputs
We recently took a step to achieve this when the fertiliser spreader was in need of an upgrade.
After a few calculations showed the heavy depreciation of our current machine, along with the news that our slurry contractor was retiring, a slurry tanker was purchased instead.
The flexibility of having our own tanker has meant some land requires far less artificial fertiliser, which was a welcome deduction from the order sheet.
The challenge, though, will be making this financially viable when moving slurry over longer distances.
In future, getting our assets to work harder for us by providing multiple benefits will be one of the aims when making farm decisions. Take the slurry tanker, for example – it both removes slurry from the dairy and applies it as fertiliser to the arable land.
This aim also translates to our cropping programme.
With the loss of direct payments, a dual income from both the crop and subsidy is no longer the norm, so finding something to fill that subsidy void is the plan.
A potential solution came this year with our accidental companion crop.
A previous crop of lucerne (a notoriously hard crop to kill) bloomed in our direct-drilled spring barley. As a result, we decided to crimp the barley and bale the straw.
The straw has made some really high-value feed, and the crimped barley has been a very welcome product, especially with the current prices of straights.
This also meant we had a cover crop ready after harvest which, in hindsight, we could have taken a silage cut from to gain an extra benefit.
As a follow-up this season, I am looking to trial some undersowing, with the aim of minimising time spent with fields not growing a crop. Grass seed sown into the spring barley, and clover into wheat will hopefully yield some interesting results.
