- Location
- Derbyshire
Exactly,. Everyone head you say efficiency, but nobody saw the question in the middle line!
"Improving Our Lot" - Planned Holistic Grazing, for starters..
- Thread starter Kiwi Pete
- Start date
- Location
- Isle of Skye
- Location
- Glen Clova, Angus, DD8 4RD
Financial efficiency?
Biological efficiency?
Time efficiency?
Resource efficiency?
That's why we all need a Holistic Context and why we will all have subtly (or not so subtly) different answers.
- Location
- pembrokeshire
its surprising how you can improve a pasture by just feeding it making sure its well drained basic slag and ground limestone are the best to make sure the P H is correct harrow the feck out of the feg in the bottom graze hard then top the left overs the poor grass will die out and the more productive will take over,have you noticed the lawns are cut each week and the grass grows like f--k i found this out from my elders and i was too poor to reseed, i think the modern seed you buy is bred to die out making you buy more, my parents generation thought ammonium nitrate was the devils invention
- Location
- Derbyshire UK
Did your soil analysis show you were down on these minerals or is it a maintenance dressing?
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Turning sun and water into lunch
I would select those who could feed their family without having to rush out and buy it
That's dreadfully inefficient so another good question maybe "why be efficient at feeding a system that creates inefficiencies"
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Just "luck", a communications error meant that we had a spare tonne bag of minerals sat at the yard that missed out on being mixed with a client's super.
So it was purely being in the right place at the right time, I asked my boss if he was "going to own up or let me help"
so now the 45ha worth of mineral mix is gone
- Location
- NSW, Newstralya
On Loving Animals and Eating Them Too Or: Why Meat is Murder and Veggies are Genocide
Some controversial thoughts on the morality of eating meat. And plants.
medium.com
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
That's really good.On Loving Animals and Eating Them Too Or: Why Meat is Murder and Veggies are Genocide
Some controversial thoughts on the morality of eating meat. And plants.
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
I found that if I test the brix of my lawn and then went out pasture testing I struggled to best the reading from the lawn (we never remove the clippings).
It's only in the past 12 months that we've been able to match it but the main reason for that is we're taking less away and in no hurry to put the lawn-mowers back there.
All this "raising production" does is very similar to pumping water into your milk tank to send more litres, after putting ammonium sulphate out yesterday I would expect our brix will drop and our covers to rise.
Similarly growing upright bunchgrasses vs prostrate sod forming grasses can easily lend itself to growing large volumes of water-soluble carbs that are lacking in minerals and vitamins due to the rate of growth 'under the right conditions'.
When you have abundant rainfall it can mean you're grazing too fast for the requirements of the land and stock - which is why I don't use a plate meter, it concentrates your mind on grass instead of the whole
- Location
- Glen Clova, Angus, DD8 4RD
A great analogy. I'll borrow that one
- Location
- pembrokeshire
efficiency i have never been able to work it out, is it getting the most product for the least effort, or the most product for the least cost ,
many years ago my mother told a chap farming a thousand acres, her son was farming seventy odd acres and asked what i should do to he said that i should give up and make room for the large efficient farmers, he came unstuck in the eighties, and in the nineties i was farming his one remaining farm,as well as my own farm, i had moved to, ifficiency of scale did not do him any good when the interest rates shot up ,
it you measure efficiency by how many acres one farmer needs to make a living then large farms are terribly inefficient and should be banned
- Location
- pembrokeshire
ar but what is a large farm when i was young where we lived most of the farms were between 80 and 120 acres these were dairy and a bit of corn a few roots the 120 acres were like gentlemen farmers with a cowman and a tractor driver some silly bugger in adas came up with the idea that if you put in a parlor one man could farm a 100 acres as a neighbour said to me its a sod trying to move stock on your own all those farms have gone now the houses are occupied by lifestyle owners and the farm land is taken up by large dairy units with thousands of cows perhaps this is the way of the world, myself i farm with my son, i am a worn out sixty seven year old, i hope with my life time of knowledge and his modern ways we compliment each other ,he is keen on his sheep ,i'm! not, we got rid of the last cattle last year due to the poor returns,he is into min till i still think there is a place for the plough so we do a bit of both, back to what you said about large farms being ineficient its down to the fact that a family farm will pull all the stops out when the weather comes we dont think of overtime we just get on and do it but its a poor show that we have to work this hard to make a living what do you call a large farm?i have no time for corporate farming and absentee farmers i think the rot set in with the likes of oliver walston,what he did is a crime against good husbandry
no idea what size a large farm is but by this measure the larger per farmer the more inefficient
so if you can cut your acreage by half and still provide "a living" for yourself as a farmer then you are increasing your efficiency by this measure
just using this as an exsample as to why its not very helpful to simply tell us we need to improve efficiency without telling us what they think we need to be more efficient at
- Location
- Glen Clova, Angus, DD8 4RD
Small market garden operations are WAY more efficient in food produced per acre and income per acre than any cereal or livestock farm.....
How are they for labour per acre though.
Fenwick
Member
- Location
- Bretagne France
Depends on how you do your maths. Small market gardens require HUGE inputs. Often all the seed, all the plants all the fertility all the water.
A intensive broiler unit is even more as efficient by those standards.