- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Carrying on from last week’s bucolic floral observations…and they were a necessary antidote to some stuff that was winding me up to the point that I had to put my head in a happy place before I reached the precipice. With continued warmth and dampness, grass is motoring almost everywhere, and I’ve got some more cattle sold while they were still in test. Due to domestic pressure, I am trying to get the number below 300, but fresh little blighters keep appearing out of the gorse bushes.
Reporting how my sales had gone to a chum, who is relatively new to cattle farming locally, he looked disappointed at the price of some yearling stores I mentioned…embarrassed for me. I had to lead him gently through why this might be the case by asking what colour the molehills were on his land…they’re brown, whereas almost all of mine are black. His cows live on podzolic loam, mine are almost exclusively on unimproved peat. And the difference this makes is stark. It gets even more extreme when I’m looking across to another neighbour, whose cattle spend 6-7 months a year on a lowland ‘redland’ farm –red sandstone over limestone. Given that he’s also twice the farmer I’ll ever be, the difference between his South Devons- when they make their annual pilgrimage up onto his hill ground- and mine is, um…evident.
I’m pretty relaxed about this. I understand the limitations of the land I farm, and more pointedly, that trying to overcome it by additional inputs wouldn’t leave me better off….far from it as well as I can tell. I could keep less stock, so they’d have more grass, which would certainly improve their lot in the short term. Regrettably, with much of the ground unreachable with flails and swipes, I’d soon be having very large fires as the trash grew up. We watched, when understocked after FMD, as the farm rapidly started disappearing under scrub.
This moves me along to an online discussion I’ve been vaguely watching, about ‘pasture fed beef’, or whatever it’s called. This movable feast –ho ho- is the very laudable idea of promoting beef from beasts which have lived on nothing more than grazed grass –and presumably conserved grass during the winter months. And here’s where we hit the buffers already. I take it – and I haven’t been paying very sharp attention if I’m honest- there is discussion about what can be conserved, and how.
Modern hi-tech grassland systems, where carefully selected hybrid ryegrass is grown as a tilled crop, cut every ten minutes all summer, and reseeded every other year, is a very different beast to…..well, some systems. Productivity is undoubtedly through the roof, but of course, so are inputs. I’m not going to admit here that I cut significant crops off two different farms which haven’t seen a plough or any reseeds since the last war….you’d only think I must be some kind of idiot. But as the discussion about what is or isn’t ‘pasture fed’ ebbed and flowed, I was led to think about the grade of soil beneath the cattle’s feet, and the prevailing local weather landing on it. It is everything. My friend with his red soil can indeed raise cattle off grass much fitter and fatter than I can, but any kind of prolonged dry period sees that ground very quickly change….the grass goes yellow and the ground rings like iron. It’s then that his having some hill land makes sense.
And we’ve haven’t touched on soil ph yet. While most of my ground is desperately acidic, I’ve got a bit of off land overlying limestone which isn’t. And my goodness isn’t that different. Being part of a former dairy farm, it’s also still growing nettles –a sure sign of plenty of lingering nitrates. So I seldom sprinkle any fertiliser on it, yet it goes on and on growing grass. As I’m sat at the desk, I’ve got 2 fields baled already, which were ‘grazed to destruction’ before the ewes came home in late March. Away from hedgerow rabbit incursions, the crop was already waist deep, and with some midsummer rain, has every chance of growing another cut yet. We’ve also noticed that since acquiring the land my South Devon cows seem to have increased in frame by 50-100kgs. My replacement heifers now spend a full year there, away from amorous male bovines. It’s a chore, having to go down and fill up round feeders through the winter, but looking across the herd now, the difference is clear.
It’s all relative, and assuming a norm is pointless…..benchmarking is fine and dandy if you’re all stood at the same bench! The one thing I’ve learnt for sure is that I don’t know much yet.
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Anton's articles are syndicated exclusively by TFF by kind permission of the author and WMN.
Anton also writes regularly for the Dartmoor Magazine and the NFU
He has published two books; the second "The Complete Bullocks" is still in print
http://www.anton-coaker.co.uk/book.htm
