Good job there. How long is your planned round?
Yes I was going to follow up to say it probably looks worse than it is, and it didn't look quite as bad next day even. They've churned it rather than turn it to soup, if you know what I mean. A previous patch on an awful day they huddled 1 end of the paddock and turned a small area to soup. That'll take a lot more to recover.
Was aiming for 50+ day rotation but the slow spring will bring that down to nearer 40, though I shall give this paddock longer.
I'd love to see what that would look like if you could afford it 80 days (ie skip it, or even just skip a part of it if you're still tight for tucker.
that's because you put a posh system in ! Ours is pretty well all on reels, with a few strategic ht hot wires, do scour the internet for 'cheap' metal elec posts though. Our vaderstat cost £7500, a big purchase, when in the middle of drought, and buying fodder, good buy, and probably paid for itself x2, grass/clover/grass seed, lot gone there, but would have reseeded anyway, minimum cultivation cost, and in house, the drill gives us the choice, dd, mintil, overseeding, or the whole works accurately. For that outlay, we have turned our farm full circle, (or at least half)It probably cost a bit as far as "research and design" went.
But we didn't have to do all that, I just have insatiable curiosity/ irreducable rascality in my makeupit is what it is.
We could have shortcut a lot of that out but I am glad we had a play around with different things just to prove that they weren't "the best" before we redesigned our fencing layout etc, just so we didn't miss too many tricks.
I think our 28ha of "deluxe deluxe" techno will have cost around $450/ha all told - which isn't huge as a one-off capital type improvement. Could have done it much cheaper but "why"
it probably sounds cheaper if you divide that per paddock or per animal unit - we have 280 permanent paddocks set up for just under $44 per paddock, including water with minerals in it
A diversification opportunity?
Costs are funny things. Because we have such a simple business (and it has a high P:E ratio) it's quite easy to justify a one-off expense.
Different if it's a more marginal business, there may be more money there but still it isn't apparent always if it will save you much - or just cost you much
I don't like recurring costs at all . Hence the grand design away from "all that stuff" that went with the old design, things like fertility transfer, uneven grazing, time input -and tangles
I am just in the process of mocking up the runners for my motorbikes - have some 10mm round bar to bend up and a bit of 40x4 for mounting brackets off the frame. Once I get that sorted out I'll pop up some photos so that chief bodger @exmoor dave can laugh at my welds
Good stuff.
I think I've said that before
Outcomes are what matter most! Not necessarily the methods that gain these better outcomes for us.
Often feel the same way when I relive our journey, so much of the trial and error stuff was really just error, but the big thing is that we learnt and improved, which is the name of the game.
Like the wasting grass grazing thing, I'm really glad we did that, just as I'm really glad we learnt from it and kept looking for new stuff to try... one of the big things here is stocking rate and how that has climbed.
I think when Ian came here - @holwellcourtfarm, was that coming up 4 years?? we were grazing 400 sheep and 7 calves - and had no feed on the land to speak of in May after a pretty wet and bountiful year.
This year we are supposedly in drought conditions or "very dry" and have 38 sheep and are cruising along with 130 bovines in 300 paddocks and enough grass to get us to the end of September if it stopped growing today
but yeah, plans are useless in farming
sorry all, been concentrating on other things for a couple of days.
Always been good when ive dealt with them up to feb this yr anyway. could do with some more of these screw in insulators from them as i dont know where else to get them and they're ideal for tightening up and wrapping around to continue on another line they grip the polywire snugly so no knots etc needed to spoil the wire.
)by sheep Dec/ to end of Jan down to nothing and some obviously trodden in..(all except the rushes which were to big and dry for them )
I like the wraparound idea, good thinking. I've done a bit of that with those plastic insulated handles, they store quite a bit of spare and then it's there for a rainy day
Conduit works great for quads if you get stuck for time. Generally you can find a hole in around the front end somewhere, poke the ends in and pull the top of the tongue up with string, tie off to carrier.Can't wait too see them for bodgespection
I bought some 19mm ali tube and some ali flat to make runners for my quad..... been sat in a pile for a year.
Trouble is that a poly stake held in one hand to push the fence down as you drive over is pretty easy too
had another option idea, if the ground is just 'puddled' and grass is still there, might look sick, but should comeback, another option could be to put a small amount of forage rape, as a temporary fix, till the grass sorts itself out.
