Livestock Farmer Focus: Clyde Jones has an abundance of grass growth

I am not normally one to rant, but this disinformation has to stop. In the words of Disraeli “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the end your right to say it”. However, this should only be the case when the statement comes from somebody who knows what they are talking about.

Two examples currently attracting much media debate are, badger culling and Nocton dairy. With articles written and spoken by people who really have no idea what they are talking about and should use better research. How these people get their “15 minutes of fame” is beyond me.

The grass has continued to grow like billyo (that’s a technical term yet to be used in agri colleges) with average cover at 2670kg/ha of DM and a growth of 64kg/ha of DM a day, which is what you may call compensatory growth from the summer standstill.

We have used this abundance of growth to get some paddocks reseeded and have timed this with the final rotation. After the last grazing for the year and an application of round-up, a 40% mixture of Matrix grass seed and white clover at 25kg/ha was drilled. With soil temperatures of 16C, I am hopeful this will work. We have also been able to make some good quality silage bales and these will be fed to the calf in the outwintering paddock.

Grazing residuals are not brilliant at the moment and we are putting this down to too much “imported” feed fed to cows during the dry summer. Without the necessary worm activity to remove dung pats this means grass remains tainted. The local rooks, however, are helpfully turning over the pats looking for grubs. Perhaps they are put off last year’s sport of pecking holes in our bales by the double wrap of green and black plastic which makes them resemble giant humbugs.

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