Feeder wagons are becoming the norm for profitable beef and dairy units, but they don’t come cheap. Oliver Mark meets a Welsh farmer that has added accuracy on a tighter budget.

Stashing winter fodder is a summer priority for livestock farmers, but knowing exactly how much you’re squirrelling away can be difficult to keep track of.

Before the days of mixer wagons, counting the bales and having an educated guess at their weight was standard practice. The likes of Keenan and Kverneland have brought feeding accuracy along leaps and bounds, but at £20,000-plus they’re still difficult to justify for those operating on a more modest scale.

For Pembrokeshire farmer Phil Jones, the steep price of a feeder wagon wasn’t an option for his low-cost, one-man beef system, but he was still determined to find an affordable way of improving his feeding accuracy.

Weighlog

His solution was an onboard weighing system for his rear-engined Manitou telehandler, which allows him to keep a keen eye on the quantities of muck going on to the fields and the feed coming off them.

The Weighlog Alpha 10, made by Gloucestershire-based digi-screen specialist RDS, was fitted in the cab of the farm’s 57-plate Manitou 627 ready for springtime muckspreading.

“Muck is money in an organic system like ours,” says Mr Jones, who runs a herd of 110 Welsh Black cross Limousin spring-calving sucklers on the 160ha family farm in Cynwyl Elfed, Pembrokeshire.

“Our fertiliser options are obviously limited, but we now check P and K levels across the farm and run a nutrient management plan to pick and choose the fields that need the muck.”

The farm switched to organic in 2005 after Mr Jones took the reins of a neighbouring farm. It allowed him to make the change without slashing stock numbers but demanded more accurate field records, particularly where muck and slurry were concerned.

“It usually works out that we now muck the fields furthest from the yard first because we’ve traditionally left them until last,” he says.

“In the past we’ve just guessed how much muck was going into the spreader and on to the field, but this year we’ve been able to weigh each load to begin to build field profiles.”

Once calibrated to each of the Manitou’s attachments, the Weighlog records the weight of each bucketload and keeps a running tally of the number of loads using a sensor mounted on the boom.

This year local contractors spread 441t of muck – 457 bucketloads – across the farm’s 33ha of prime silage land using two West Dual 1600 spreaders. Spreading is pretty uniform because muck dry matter is fairly consistent – cows are bedded in rubber-matted cubicles rather than on straw, and weeping walls in the pit drain the slurry juice ready for tankering to the best silage fields.

Grass silage

Cows at Lan Farm are housed from October, so there’s pressure on Mr Jones to get his feed calculations spot on.

The 38ha of clamp grass silage has traditionally been more difficult to portion out than round bales when it comes to feeding, and to prove the variation Mr Jones took four shear grab bites down the clamp profile and weighed each of them.

“The top layer weighed 3,860kg, the second was 4,280kg, the third was 4,920kg and the load taken from the bottom of the clamp weighed 4,470kg,” says Mr Jones.

“It proves that working by sight is pure guesswork, although it’s not pivotal in our ad-lib feeding system. It’s only at weaning that the cows’ feed is reined in to a more controlled maintenance ration and we have to keep a closer eye on intake.”

Top fodder

Protein comes in the form of five-year red- or white-clover lays. This prime fodder usually covers about 10ha and feeds the youngstock over winter in combination with an arable wholecrop mix at a ratio of 3:1.

The mix of peas and barley stops the animals pigging-out on the clover, and it can be fed accurately now that there’s a means of monitoring it.

Lean years have also seen the farm run tight on the wholecrop portion of the diet, but the Weighlog helps to keep a closer eye on food stocks.

“It definitely reduces the risk of us running out of one ingredient,” says Mr Jones.

“I know that our calves are getting through 15kg red clover and 5kg wholecrop each day – enough to hit our 1.2kg daily liveweight gains – and by weighing and feeding the exact ration we can save as much as 100kg every week.”

“That equates to a one bale a week saving, which could add up to a lot over the course of a winter,” he says.

Bales are weighed as they come off the field and again at feeding. This gives Mr Jones an indication of how dry matter levels have changed during storage and a good idea of the weight of the bales, which Mr Jones’ records show is just as important as the quantity.

He runs a John Deere 1365 trailed mower behind his Ford 7840 and knocked down the first 2.5ha field of first-cut red clover on 15 May. That yielded 28 bales at a cumulative weight of 19,800kg. Average bale weight was 707kg – a lot lighter than the 767kg bales taken from the 18-bale second-cut in the same field on 19 June.

“I can watch the field yields like a hawk,” says Mr Jones.

“The real advantage of the Weighlog is the peace of mind I get knowing exactly what is coming in and out of the clamp.”

“The fact that I can also use it to monitor the amount of lime and muck going on the fields is a bonus, and it makes field records – an extra pressure in our organic system – much simpler,” he says.

“We’re now achieving better yields and better use of what we’re growing because we can select the best fields for the job. Lots of fine-tuning goes a long way and I am determined to prove that I can do it without a feeder wagon.”