Belter of a post and bang on ….imo this clover thing and amount of n it’s claiming to reduce is suspect at best ….I’ve incorporated a bit but at higher sr I can’t honestly see any benefit ….can’t say cows do better on fields I have more clover ….I’m more interested in seen what a mss sward will do long term
Bloat is the least of it, on high molybdenum soils white clover is literally poison to animals, teagasc know this they have documented research on it and know vast areas of Ireland are simply not suitable for clover swards
They're f**King clowns plain and simple
They can put "clover massively increases methane and CO2 production in cows" in the "we didn't think of the calves" box
Teagasc are civil servants. Their job is to support Govt policy such as FoodWise-2030 which is all about driving up exports/production. When something affects that single goal, like fertiliser price or environment issues, then they jump on any quick fix - like MMS, increasing clover, sexed semen, DBI, etc. Anything that might help, but won't impact the main policy (driving exports)
Why would you bother with clover on grazing paddocks. Foliar feeding costs less than 20 euros per acre each round and you are in full control of grass, not depending on the uncertain clover growth, no spring growth, variable in summer and autumn depending on weather, bloat risk. Now red clover for dedicated silage swards is OK but only lasts 3 to 4 years. And dont get me started on mixed species swards, most will die out after 2 or 3 years and all you are left with are poor grass, clover and weeds. You would wonder where Teagasc get these genius advisors. One head guy comes up with a theory and all the minions repeat it like parrots and when said often enough it becomes fact.
I’d thank this post 10 times if I could.
You can but we don’t need to here, most of the farm gets picked up
very rare you’d have a cow chronically sick at grass, any really sick cows here are usually around calving when they’re in the yard
You'd wonder sometimes, alright. Teagasc comes up with an idea, no research, becomes policy, farmers run with it. Then a big Uturn within a few years.
There's a share of "dairy experts" in Teagasc and the ifj that are from sheeps farms and they think they have invented the wheel re dairying. So many of their big policy creations since 2012 have completely failed. How much of their new big policy's in the last 10 yrs, from tillage farm conversions, to golf ball grazing, to OWP, to OCs, to lagoons, to Jerseys, to NZx, to high stocking rates, RBI/EBI now clover etc is sustainable, good practice dairy farming.
Most of these were tried from the 50s to the80s and failed, farmers learned leasons, and moved ahead. The new advisors arrived on the scene post 2012, were of the opinion that dairying needed fixing and have done untold harm to an ag industry that was doing very well.
I can’t speak from a dairy cow point of view but from a beef perspective I’ve a lot of swards with very high clover content and haven’t had any problems grazing them. The first day cattle are let on to them I make sure they’re full from wherever they came from. If you let them out hungry they will gorge on it. It is recommended to have access to hay or straw for the first few days and restrict the intake. I’ve never done this and didn’t run into problems but again it’s beef stock and not dairy cows I have.
Silage made from these swards is top quality too. I regularly make silage above 30%dm, high 70’s in dmd and high teens for protein. It will only yield 6-8 bales per acre every time but 3 cuts a year is no problem and all top quality.
Can you install a number of stations arou d the farm?
Have collars yes but it happened so quickly it wouldn’t have picked it up
collars we have will pick them up if they’re within 800m from station
To pick up distress you need an aid that is within range of the data controller at all times. Do any of the collars stay connected at all times? Thought they only upload info when the cow returns to the parlour. The dead cow may not come back..
Hard going. Do you have collars or something. Would they not pick up the distress?
To me it sounds more like nitrogen bloat than clover
lost a 1st calver here 2 weeks ago and still sickened, she got fucked over the roadway fence and bloated up on the spot
lost 5 in 2018 on my daughters 1st birthday, still haunts me. I absolutely hate loosing stock to the knackery, the loss of what could have been irks me big time
Go foliar and just grass and whatever clover seeds itself.
Small farm here and I couldn't afford to lose stock to bloat with heavy clover. Lost a few in my father's time to bloat from clover too. You'd think sometimes agriculture has just been invented by advisors and farmers have just come from the town to try it out..
It's good that we have farmers coming out telling us their experiences of clover. When we were on a teagasc clover research farm it was all positive from the advisor untill we asked about bloat. No problem lately except the year we lost 20 cows was the reply. Not anti Teagasc but this is a bit like the 'oops we didn't think about the Jersey bulls', pushing clover without a solution to the bloat issue. Going out to the field out and finding an animal dead is such a demoralising aspect of farming that a lot will be slow to adapt any measures that might increase that risk.
Dunno will we have a choice but figure it out
Some way to lose animals and the work involved trying to prevent it from happening. Plan doing lots of reseeding and thought clover was only way to go, is it or just go with grass and suck up high fertiliser prices but with less minding of clover as well?
Happened to a friend of mine years ago and he never gotbover it. Never again comfortable about using clover.
Warning for any with high levels of clover, some buffering before they go out seems to be the way to go
Anyone that bought a Grasshopper plate meter.
Did ye get a charger with it too?
I got a charging cable but no charger.
I've emailed them off a message but no response yet.
Tried phone chargers with the same ports but it won't charge.
Rough estimate here would be 24 l per day..
Where does this complicate things?
If we build a dirty water storage tank, how many weeks must it be able to hold? Previously it was 10 days, what is it now?
Day. I have plenty storage anyway so it doesn't matter to me at the moment. And unless I get more land my cow numbers are going to be only going one way due to regulations. Just making the point that for us the figure should be halved.
Per milking or per day?
I see teagasc are saying parlour washings add up to 30 litres per cow. That's way off compared to my calculations at 11 litres per cow on my farm. Another guy in my discussion group came up with a similar figure to me when he measured his water use.
Have used ubroseal the last few years ,happy enough with it,however it was without the blue dye. Think I got last of the old batch from my vet last year without dye. My understanding from my vet is that coops are pushing it as residues of sealer were tainting cheese?? Stand to be corrected on that now though
I'd say it's cepralock I'm thinking of. It's a new product. Less air in the tube is one of their improvements they claim to have
Isn't it just the new name for Leo red? Ubro red
It's about 4.5 euro for the normal stuff. I get a good bit of leakage on the cubicles that I would like to cut out. I never heard of ubro anything but I heard that there is a new blue sealer that is supposed to be better.
Used it last year, work well but it did seem to take a fair few milkings to strip it out, could still see it after a week in some cases.
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