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We make bale silage from our PP it may not be good enough for dairy cows [though we use to feed ours on it] but most of our suckler cows are to fat and the calves do well on it I think they do just as well in the winter as the summer.
We cut it quite early usually mid may onwards, we do it ourselves so it takes a while when we get the weather doing a few fields at a time, I am not bothered with getting vast amounts as long as we average about 7 bales per acre that is good enough for me, sometimes when we start its only doing 5 to the acre.
any that gets to old and some of our flower medow type stuff is best made to hay is best made to hay
when we used to do a lot of contract bailing we would start here as early as anywhere else and do a few fields for different customers as we went along some of the customers grass would be rye grass and while it looked like there was far more there before it was cut time it came to bailing it there wasn't much difference, the rye grass was much taller but not as thick.
thinking some/all the quality issues in p/p silage, could well be us not cutting it earlier, as in not enough there, and usually end up suprised how much there actually is there. The 'modern' teaching for silage, is multicut, taking grass earlier, to get quality, and some say higher end yield. p/p is usually much denser than a prg ley, so yield wise, perhaps not to different, quality, you can certainly make rocket fuel, from leys, a lot of which goes straight through, and therefore they eat it quicker, so, is that gain in super quality that good, especially if you need to add straw, to give some roughage, to slow it down. Dairy farming is dividing, one way is high imput/output, the other is low cost, the ones between, will just carry on, as before, and be fine, if no labour. Sweeping statement, love to be contentious.
But with the low cost herds, do our cows need rocket fuel, probably not, but they do need quality, and perhaps older grass leys, or p/p, with a diverse selection of grasses, herbs and clover, are not so far off.