Farmer Focus: Weather extremes squeeze drilling and silaging

I often start with the weather and how it’s affecting things on the farm. But when it changes so much from one month to the next, as it has this year, it’s almost impossible not to.

It’s been extremely busy as we’ve tried to take advantage of the dry weather.

We finished drilling the maize on 23 April, the latest we’ve got done since we began using film 10 years ago.

See also: How new slurry store sets up dairy to optimise spreading

About the author

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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The next week we moved onto cutting grass, with first cut completed on 30 April, which was the earliest we have ever cut.

Yield was pretty good, but probably not as heavy as I thought it would be before we started.

Unusually, we have quite a lot of forage left over from last year, so it’ll be a little while before this is added to the ration.

The builders have got a good start, with the dress weather a real gift for digging out the new slurry store.

This will be built in three stages to reduce double handling of the fill we have used to level the site.

There are more than 7,000 reinforcing starter bars in the base of the store, each requiring welding to the sheets in place before the floor is poured and the walls shuttered. It’s painstaking work.

The cows are performing really well, producing 3.35kg of solids/day, with good cow health and fertility.

Usually, I hate feeding chopped straw to milkers, and we only add it when we have a problem. But I resisted the urge to remove it this time and I think it is assisting rumen health.

Arla’s 1.76p/litre price increase came as a welcome surprise. I’m not sure what measures were out there to help us see it coming, but we will gladly take it.

I’d like to make an educated guess on the milk price over the next six or 12 months, but honestly, I think doing so just makes a fool of you.

We are going to have a surplus of heifers this year, with around 30 to sell sometime before Christmas.

Normally, things improve in the second half of the year, when milk volumes fade a little and the buyer’s seasonality switches, and that’s when I was hoping to sell them.

But we don’t really seem to do “normal” anymore, so we will just wait and see.