Muck spreading

Banana Republic 1

Is there a move to ban muck spreaders in the way as splash plate slurry is under fire.

Gawddawggonnit

Banana Republic 1 wrote: »

Is there a move to ban muck spreaders in the way as splash plate slurry is under fire.

Nope.

endainoz

Banana Republic 1 wrote: »

Is there a move to ban muck spreaders in the way as splash plate slurry is under fire.

Not really any other way to get dung out in fairness...

Banana Republic 1

endainoz wrote: »

Not really any other way to get dung out in fairness...

Ya I know but there was a person I know on the war path.

_Brian

There should be a push to encourage their use if anything and get back to straw bedding and sing on land.

But instead they are encouraging less straw and so more slurry

Hard Knocks

Banana Republic 1 wrote: »

Ya I know but there was a person I know on the war path.

Sadly there’s always someone & instead of telling them to shut up & cop on we bend over backwards

jd_12345

Imo the straw chopping scheme is for stopping lads from leaving bales of straw sitting in fields unsold in years where demand is poor. It provides certainty to tillage farmers imo. That’s talking as a dairy farmer.
If people are consistently buying straw off the same people every year they won’t get scalded and the tillage farmer knows that it will buy. When straw is cheap no one wants it. When straw is dear everyone wants it. This scheme is made for farmers in tillage areas where there is little organic matter available locally. The scheme isn’t that generous. Imo it should break no farmer to pay €25 per round bale of good quality straw when you consider the quality bedding that it provides and the feeding value for young calves.

Hard Knocks

jd_12345 wrote: »

Imo the straw chopping scheme is for stopping lads from leaving bales of straw sitting in fields unsold in years where demand is poor. It provides certainty to tillage farmers imo. That’s talking as a dairy farmer.
If people are consistently buying straw off the same people every year they won’t get scalded and the tillage farmer knows that it will buy. When straw is cheap no one wants it. When straw is dear everyone wants it. This scheme is made for farmers in tillage areas where there is little organic matter available locally. The scheme isn’t that generous. Imo it should break no farmer to pay €25 per round bale of good quality straw when you consider the quality bedding that it provides and the feeding value for young calves.

Straw was €25 at the start of winter & €35 at the end around here

Say my name

jd_12345 wrote: »

Imo the straw chopping scheme is for stopping lads from leaving bales of straw sitting in fields unsold in years where demand is poor. It provides certainty to tillage farmers imo. That’s talking as a dairy farmer.
If people are consistently buying straw off the same people every year they won’t get scalded and the tillage farmer knows that it will buy. When straw is cheap no one wants it. When straw is dear everyone wants it. This scheme is made for farmers in tillage areas where there is little organic matter available locally. The scheme isn’t that generous. Imo it should break no farmer to pay €25 per round bale of good quality straw when you consider the quality bedding that it provides and the feeding value for young calves.

It's the result of specialist tillage farming and areas becoming specialist tillage areas over the past thirty years.

I'm in Wexford a predominantly tillage county. We've the ifa spokesperson from here. We've tillage farmers that over that thirty and forty years that have accumulated thousands of acres. There was never the quota on production like other sectors of farming.
We've fields here now over a 100 acres in size, ditches taken out to accommodate 20ft combine headers. Combines with straw choppers are common place with the large farmers who went that big during those years.
The big square balers are favoured with these farmers (if they do bale) as they can't be bothered or have the time to sell to livestock farmers.
These bales are then stacked outdoors in stacks with bale chasers and then they have to beg the mushroom industry to take them. Must be begging as these stacks I see get moved from field to yard to field to yard.

Soil is poisoned with fertilizer, fungicide, herbicide, and bludgeoned to death with whatever life is left with the plough.
Some are going min till as they saw the harm being done. These most likely the same one's that have a chopper on the combine.

There's farmers I know who milk cows and also would have considerable areas of tillage ground and they themselves wouldn't bed the cows on straw but went for cubicles for housing.

An ex dairy farm near a local town has land leased to a tillage farmer. Excellent yields were had for the past years after grass. Winter wheat was sown last autumn. Half the field had to be resown to spring wheat. Such is the good gone from the ground now.
Wheat, oilseed, being the rotation. Take as much as they could from the soil.
My father passing that field shook his head in disbelief that how has farming come to that now. Farming was never meant for farmers to only do tillage. It's reaping the whirlwind on leaving what farmers were good at year's ago, mixed farming with smaller acreages that they could manage.
.....

Myself if I had to pay €25 a bale that'd be €7500 on bedding.

Would you pay €7500 yourself jd on bedding or would you look for alternatives?

jd_12345

Say my name wrote: »

It's the result of specialist tillage farming and areas becoming specialist tillage areas over the past thirty years.

I'm in Wexford a predominantly tillage county. We've the ifa spokesperson from here. We've tillage farmers that over that thirty and forty years that have accumulated thousands of acres. There was never the quota on production like other sectors of farming.
We've fields here now over a 100 acres in size, ditches taken out to accommodate 20ft combine headers. Combines with straw choppers are common place with the large farmers who went that big during those years.
The big square balers are favoured with these farmers (if they do bale) as they can't be bothered or have the time to sell to livestock farmers.
These bales are then stacked outdoors in stacks with bale chasers and then they have to beg the mushroom industry to take them. Must be begging as these stacks I see get moved from field to yard to field to yard.

Soil is poisoned with fertilizer, fungicide, herbicide, and bludgeoned to death with whatever life is left with the plough.
Some are going min till as they saw the harm being done. These most likely the same one's that have a chopper on the combine.

There's farmers I know who milk cows and also would have considerable areas of tillage ground and they themselves wouldn't bed the cows on straw but went for cubicles for housing.

An ex dairy farm near a local town has land leased to a tillage farmer. Excellent yields were had for the past years after grass. Winter wheat was sown last autumn. Half the field had to be resown to spring wheat. Such is the good gone from the ground now.
Wheat, oilseed, being the rotation. Take as much as they could from the soil.
My father passing that field shook his head in disbelief that how has farming come to that now. Farming was never meant for farmers to only do tillage. It's reaping the whirlwind on leaving what farmers were good at year's ago, mixed farming with smaller acreages that they could manage.
.....

Myself if I had to pay €25 a bale that'd be €7500 on bedding.

Would you pay €7500 yourself jd on bedding or would you look for alternatives?

Oh i'd totally look for alternatives if it was me. Spend roughly €1400/year on straw and I'd say about 300 of that is haulage. Thats the price of bales around here in mid cork btw.
My own view is dung is hit and hope as a fertiliser. Dung from cows yes is good stuff for the ground. Dung from young calves who are just p***ing milk isn't massively beneficial imo.
The ultimate alternative is the slat. I'm followed the cows with the splashplate at 2000gallons per acre and I had better grass than what got 20 units of sweetgrass per acre.
My understanding of tillage is limited but does slurry on tillage ground lead to lodging where not properly managed?
The other problem with dung is it needs to be managed, regularly turned etc. for maximum benefit.
Yes I agree to a certain extent that there should have been some scheme set up to return FYM to tillage farmers but hauliers would've probably been the big winners when all is said and done.
Btw in this part of the world straw bedding is almost unheard of.
If straw is sitting in bales in fields anyway should it not be chopped? Maybe I picked up your point wrong.

In the UK it is said that despite the precision agronomists, etc. that it is livestock farmers get some of the best tillage yields due to copious amounts of FYM.
I think the points you raised are more fundamental problems with tillage rather than straw chopping scheme.

Bass Reeves

jd_12345 wrote: »

Imo the straw chopping scheme is for stopping lads from leaving bales of straw sitting in fields unsold in years where demand is poor. It provides certainty to tillage farmers imo. That’s talking as a dairy farmer.
If people are consistently buying straw off the same people every year they won’t get scalded and the tillage farmer knows that it will buy. When straw is cheap no one wants it. When straw is dear everyone wants it. This scheme is made for farmers in tillage areas where there is little organic matter available locally. The scheme isn’t that generous. Imo it should break no farmer to pay €25 per round bale of good quality straw when you consider the quality bedding that it provides and the feeding value for young calves.

25/bale ex tillage add 10-15 to straw costs in the west of Ireland. That for a round bale. Straw is now more expensive than hay or silage

funkey_monkey

Pay of the problem we have with straw bedding is that feeding silage to the cattle gives them loose dung and makes a hash of the straw requiring a lot more bedding to maintain cleanliness.
If running on straw bedding alfalfa is the best thing for them - dries up their dung. Hay as an alternative, but alfalfa is high in protein too.

Waffletraktor

Say my name wrote: »

It's the result of specialist tillage farming and areas becoming specialist tillage areas over the past thirty years.

I'm in Wexford a predominantly tillage county. We've the ifa spokesperson from here. We've tillage farmers that over that thirty and forty years that have accumulated thousands of acres. There was never the quota on production like other sectors of farming.
We've fields here now over a 100 acres in size, ditches taken out to accommodate 20ft combine headers. Combines with straw choppers are common place with the large farmers who went that big during those years.
The big square balers are favoured with these farmers (if they do bale) as they can't be bothered or have the time to sell to livestock farmers.
These bales are then stacked outdoors in stacks with bale chasers and then they have to beg the mushroom industry to take them. Must be begging as these stacks I see get moved from field to yard to field to yard.

Soil is poisoned with fertilizer, fungicide, herbicide, and bludgeoned to death with whatever life is left with the plough.
Some are going min till as they saw the harm being done. These most likely the same one's that have a chopper on the combine.

There's farmers I know who milk cows and also would have considerable areas of tillage ground and they themselves wouldn't bed the cows on straw but went for cubicles for housing.

An ex dairy farm near a local town has land leased to a tillage farmer. Excellent yields were had for the past years after grass. Winter wheat was sown last autumn. Half the field had to be resown to spring wheat. Such is the good gone from the ground now.
Wheat, oilseed, being the rotation. Take as much as they could from the soil.
My father passing that field shook his head in disbelief that how has farming come to that now. Farming was never meant for farmers to only do tillage. It's reaping the whirlwind on leaving what farmers were good at year's ago, mixed farming with smaller acreages that they could manage.
.....

Myself if I had to pay €25 a bale that'd be €7500 on bedding.

Would you pay €7500 yourself jd on bedding or would you look for alternatives?

Straw is a pita, only for lads who rent ground and or need to strip mine land to make their calculator say yes. As a default headlands should be chopped atleast.

GrasstoMilk

Waffletraktor wrote: »

Straw is a pita, only for lads who rent ground and or need to strip mine land to make their calculator say yes. As a default headlands should be chopped atleast.

BIL says he would chop all straw
All the tooing and froeing of trying to get it baled right, then gather it into a shed and sell later on
At a time when he's trying to get winter crops in and get rest of harvest done

We would have used 800 bales a year not so long ago just for bedding cows
All cubicles and slats now and would never go back, don't miss having to go begging for straw, lads not telling you how much they'll have for you etc when they knew you were a returning customer year on year, if they thought they'd get a euro a bale somewhere else they'd keep even less for you!

but dung did turn our farm inside out after the life was hammered from it for over 20 years of bad management with tillage crops

Waffletraktor

GrasstoMilk wrote: »

BIL says he would chop all straw
All the tooing and froeing of trying to get it baled right, then gather it into a shed and sell later on
At a time when he's trying to get winter crops in and get rest of harvest done

We would have used 800 bales a year not so long ago just for bedding cows
All cubicles and slats now and would never go back, don't miss having to go begging for straw, lads not telling you how much they'll have for you etc when they knew you were a returning customer year on year, if they thought they'd get a euro a bale somewhere else they'd keep even less for you!

but dung did turn our farm inside out after the life was hammered from it for over 20 years of bad management with tillage crops

In your area straw dung swaps should be doable but you’ve said lads were reluctant before. Here there isn’t the volume of cattle of all varieties in the area to be feasible for what volume we could do.
You can buy compost but it depends on time o year for price ie if you can stockpile it for them.
Sewage cake is £10/t and they do everything but you are limited to 10t/acre.
If there was the volume of organic matter we’d spread 30k tons per annum easy.
The reason straw is a pita is cos ideally we want combine drivers looking at a quadie or a direct drill/set of discs in the rear view mirror not getting bogged down waiting for straw to be fit. And that’s with 9/10 much better weather 30’c+ plus late August days than you get.