- Location
- Derbyshire UK
Instead of growing straight spring barley try a pea & spring barley mix. No bagged fert, one spray (pendermethrin pre em), 3t/acre on good ground.looked at peas/beans, 1.5 ton/acre, need a lot of acres, lupins are a difficult crop to grow, so best left to arable boys, vetches look interesting, and as a legume as well, thinking on that one.
lucerne is a good crop, and i have grown it, and pure red clover, but it's a forage crop, and we are looking to mix with rolled corn, to feed to y/s.
But, all the crops mentioned produce protien, and are legumes, so all are important going forwards, where ag is heading, farm produced food, and production from that, is going to be crucial. NVZ, regs have highlighted the value of slurry/fym, previously many farms saw it as a cost product, with fert use being reduced by regulations, we need to look at these protiens, that can be grown on farm. One could suggest, we need to look backwards, to go forwards, to when fert wasn't widely available, and that means a planned rotation, luckily we have a few modern things to help us !
The whole dairy, other than the very high production herds, needs to be concentrated on milk from forage/grass, and we have to fit that around ethical idea's, climate change, and belching cows, all dreamed up by those who haven't really got a clue ! The basics are right though, we have to manage our farms in a sustainable way, and that is where the regen bit comes in, we must relearn the past methods, it's called rotation, where the base was to follow a cycle, that kept fertility up, with modern ideas, it's not hard to do either, legumes, grain, grass, roots are optional.
We have sorted our grazing system, top quality silage from clover leys, now we need to look at the grain protien, unless soya is going to drop in price, which it probably won't, to many alternative uses.