Might be thunder this evening fingers crossed !Opened the pit today
Drying out, again!
- Thread starter jerseycowsman
- Start date
Bossfarmer
Member
- Location
- between Perth and Inverness
"Recently, I met with a farmer who calculated the cost of his losses from around the pit, and came up with the figure of £24,000. This figure doesn’t surprise me. You don’t see the losses but it is the equivalent of someone turning up and taking two loads away a day." quote from AHDB
William Mellor
Member
- Location
- Peak District
Not as bad as dad who has the job of driving bale wrapperSomeone must have a stiff left knee
early riser
Member
- Location
- Up North
Clamp and bales both have their place and complement each other well. Here i put all first cut into the pit but all other cuts are bales. Means i can be very flexible during grazing season, feeding bales where grass growth dictates without having to open a pit and face all the issues with secondary fermentation etc.
I think you could justify a bale shear @William Mellor
C
Can't really see that to be fair, maybe on a out side pit. But on a in door pit with walls and a roof I can't see that being right.
early riser
Member
- Location
- Up North
Shocking, but without knowing how much silage he made or how it was sheeted??
£20K? £1.50 to wrap and around 75p per bale for net wrap so where’s £20k come from? My baler cost that new 8 years ago.
Also one of my previous posts says we’ve had serious problems in the past with environmental agency not liking us having a clamp because of where the farm sits on top of a dale sloping towards which has a river running across the bottom of which is also sssi land and 2 footpaths very near by. You wouldn’t believe the amount of times we’ve been report for supposedly letting slurry run down there in the winter when all it is is rain water running off the land!
Bales are the easy fix to this situation, if we went back to a clamp I wouldn’t like to fuel any more aggravation from them
The £20k comes from what it would cost to get a contractor to bale,I could have used figures for myself and wife picking up with my forage wagon,obviously it costs me nothing!
Talked with a relation recently and he told me his silage costs were £750/month as that’s the finance cost on his self propelled every month,ffs he was serious.
With regards the Ea I wouldn’t bother losing any sleep over them coming round,do the job right and there won’t be a problem.
Negligible!
I opened my clamp 10months ago,if everything you read was correct I’d have nothing left.
jimmer
Member
- Location
- East Devon
- Location
- M6 Hard shoulder
What wagon do you run ?
- Location
- somerset
ours give chance of thunder storm today/tomorrow 33%, and we aren't 30miles away ! rest of week, fine and sunny.
No water that runs into the silage on the sidesWhat difference does a roof make on DM losses
Cows 'n grass
Member
- Location
- Modbury, South Devon
That must be why my clamp ran out shortly after Christmas last year then. I'll be careful not to make that mistake again.
Last edited:
Cows 'n grass
Member
- Location
- Modbury, South Devon
We've had 25ml since Friday and I've been out soil sampling this morning, the top inch is very dry but not quite dust, beyond an inch it is pure dust until you hit rock (that's not very far)
William Mellor
Member
- Location
- Peak District
Ow I see where the £20K comes from nowThe £20k comes from what it would cost to get a contractor to bale,I could have used figures for myself and wife picking up with my forage wagon,obviously it costs me nothing!
Talked with a relation recently and he told me his silage costs were £750/month as that’s the finance cost on his self propelled every month,ffs he was serious.
With regards the Ea I wouldn’t bother losing any sleep over them coming round,do the job right and there won’t be a problem.
Negligible!
I opened my clamp 10months ago,if everything you read was correct I’d have nothing left.
was thinking I’d slipped up somewhere! Would cost an app solute fortune if we were to get contractors in and be uneconomical Easy to say about not losing any sleep over Ea but when they come and start threaten court cases against us it’s hard to ignore, especially when we’ve already been reported to the local county council over having an angry Hereford bull running with cows in a field(he was far from angry), young stock blocking a footpath (can’t really help they were all stood next to a stile when they’d got the whole field to graze), even had a pet donkey years ago and was reported to local donkey sanctuary for apparently letting him get to fat!
No ones reported our bale stack yet 
Mr Mackay
Member
- Location
- HMP Slade , Shropshire
We are a bit like you -close to a watercourse and highish up in relation to it . I think if you are set up for bales , then its a no brainer (we do approx 1000 plus a year and thats with a Traileyre fetching them into the yard and the Manitou squeezing them on and off a Mc Hale 991BE remote control.) We recently did nearly 300 in one day between the 2 of us (with the boss tucking tails in and writing legends on the ends with wax crayons, so 3 really but 2 would do ! )Ow I see where the £20K comes from now
Easy to say about not losing any sleep over Ea but when they come and start threaten court cases against us it’s hard to ignore, especially when we’ve already been reported to the local county council over having an angry Hereford bull running with cows in a field(he was far from angry), young stock blocking a footpath (can’t really help they were all stood next to a stile when they’d got the whole field to graze), even had a pet donkey years ago and was reported to local donkey sanctuary for apparently letting him get to fat!
I liked it when we had a clamp we rented but bales allows fexibility and a cross section of lengths and qualities of feed in the bale (allows you to mix and match ,as long as you can tell what bales what !!)
Bossfarmer
Member
- Location
- between Perth and Inverness
yes if you have youngstock/cull cows or a batch of leaner ones you can feed from the stack of leafier silage, likewise anything anything a bit fit coming up to calving can get from the stemier lower ME pile, interested to know how pit guys do this
How did you manage 25mm !less than half that .But no rock!
- Tags
- maize