Dry cows on scruffy cover crop. Lucky I spent time teaching them to read.View attachment 727296
First time I'd tried it...worked a treat. Used the cheapest ones as they don't have a fish-hook so are easier to pull out. Wanted to make sure we didn't have an escape as area completely unfenced and there's no telling were they'd end up. Bridleway through the middle a pain tooNow there’s an idea for a strong corner post
Clippex fence post.
Wish I’d thought of that years ago
Still pretty dry here, but things seem to be growing. In fact, I've just had a week on a Greek island staying with friends as there didn't seem to be much to do on the farm, so everything here looks ridiculously lush. The Greeks are destroying their soils with over-grazing, ie permanently set-stocking with goats. The only things that survive are football sized thorny shrubs which the goats nibble at, everything else is bare soil, or more commonly rock as what soil they once had is washed away or burned up by the sun. A guide book I was reading (written in 1978) described a neighbouring island as 'lush' with vines and olives etc. It's now a desert, with thousands of tourists cramming the few yards of beach. Lots of abandonned terraces too on the hillsides, that the goats have eaten everything down to bare soil. The few that are still worked are cultivated to death. Really depressing to look at.
Sorry, not really answering your question, just made me all the more aware how we must look after our soils...
Wouldn’t use double strand with cows and calves?Single strand electric posts at 5m spacing. Could go further but I don’t like the sag in the wire touching the taller grasses and chicory.
Sorry to hear about the Tb, NickSingle strand 20 paces here - a chain apart. Calves creep and roam widely but as Pete says they don't want holding back. Having to ration the cows very carefully. Gone down with Tb again - had been thinking I might sell stores this backend! Not used electric for sheep yet - need to.
Frosted brassica crops could lead to bloat, best to wait for it to lift.Bloat from eating brassicas? I've never heard of that. Bloat is normally from eating highly digestible fodder like clovers.
In our area this summer has been so dry. If we were not feeding silage and creep out to our stock the live weight gain would have been terrible. We aren't fattening stock on pastures but do need our calf's to grow fast (mums to be producing milk for them). I imagine in a normal year the growth would have been better for you.Now, my maths may be a bit wobbly, but we've just weighed the mob of cattle who'd been grazing our 100 acres of herbal ley. We weighed them when they went in and so have an idea of what the ley is 'earning' beyond controlling blackgrass and other weeds and adding fertility to our arable land. I was slightly disappointed by the average result of 305kg weight gain/hectare over the summer. The animals went in in late April as it was so wet and then it never rained again. They came off last week for weighing and sorting. We'll probably do one more rotation with some of them if it doesn't get too wet, so we should add a kilo or two more.
So, using a very optimistic £2/kg liveweight price for the stores, that makes an income of £610/ha, which is some way shy of disastrous. Of course if you had to buy the stores they'd be £2+ in the spring and more like £1.70 now which takes the fun out of it a bit. Does this sound right?
So, using a very optimistic £2/kg liveweight price for the stores, that makes an income of £610/ha, which is some way shy of disastrous. Of course if you had to buy the stores they'd be £2+ in the spring and more like £1.70 now which takes the fun out of it a bit. Does this sound right?