Farmer Focus: Maize harvest exposes silage clamp shortage

Harvest was completed earlier than I ever remember. Yields were back a bit, especially the wheat, which I put down to the awful spring of 2024.

That held the maize back, which, in turn, held up wheat drilling. The barley did just under 7.5t/ha and the wheat around 8t/ha.

It was all harvested dry though, and the straw came off pretty well, so all in all I’m happy.

See also: Advice for creating temporary field clamps for maize

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Tom Stable

Tom Stable and family, Ulverston, Cumbria, milk 350 Holsteins three times a day, producing milk for Arla and ice cream for their Cumbrian Cow brand. The 300ha operation, of which two thirds is rented, grows grass, maize and winter wheat and cows average 11,800 litres.

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We got our cover crops and sheep feed drilled in a much more timely fashion than other years, having realised this is crucial to getting a decent cover on the ground.

The cover crops were something we began as part of various schemes, but we have seen the benefits and don’t leave any ground bare over winter now.

Before long, we should have completed chopping maize – though we haven’t started yet.

We hosted a “maize masterclass” with American expert John Winchell in mid-August, and he said he thought I was leaving harvest too late, losing digestibility in both the plant and the starch that sets in the cob.

With that in mind, we are hoping to bring things forward a week.

This is a difficult time to manage forage for the cows.

We are short of clamp space, so we use our main pit twice each year, filling it with first cut each May, then using that through the summer and filling it again with half the maize in September.

We empty it again ready for spring. We store three of the five grass cuts at home along with two-thirds of the maize, with the other two cuts and remaining maize clamped at the youngstock farm.

We then bring this back home through the winter.

This works from a logistics point of view, but makes this time of year really tricky.

In the space of a fortnight, we end up swapping the cows off first cut, this year onto the relatively recently ensiled fourth cut.

Then we switch from last year’s maize to this year’s. It invariably causes some upset and knocks yield for a time, but until we build more infrastructure, I can’t work out a better way of managing things.

Although I can see benefit of additional clamps, there’s a few things on the list before we get that far.