Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

Search for Bentonite Clay or Diatomite Clay.
The snakeoil peddlers will have you think that their ingredients are magic beans..but they’re one just of those Clays in a fancy bag, with an even fancier price tag.
Don’t give over 80g/hd as it can filter out minerals from the liver.

Getting all the tanks emptied out here this morning using the pipes. Going out at 2,250 gallons per ac at the minute.

Spare a thought for those on heavier soil with last week's snow still melting in! On paper I have enough storage, but even after a good Autumn and a dry Winter all my tanks are full to capacity, I don't where it all comes from. Is the 60% extra storage grant definitely coming in?

Maybe if you put a roof over the tank you wouldn't be spreading water in mid January when it's not legal keep posting pictures like this and we have a great chance of keeping derogation

You must be on low ground, north Kilkenny here and high enough, still plenty of snow around.

Midnight tonight he's legal to go. Big deal starting a few hours before. Ground looks fine and no rain in the forecast. That's the most important thing.

your not having a go but you are ….ground conditions from pictures look pretty good ….you can legally spread from today …weather for week ahead is good …fully expect to see anyone with good dry ground moving slurry this week ….lads that waited on Tegasc advice last spring won’t make same mistake again

Hmm - that very much depends on what of the country your in, soil type, and winter weather. Large parts of the country would simply be wasting it as fert and posing a water quality issue too putting it out that early in the average year. In fairness recent winters have been very benign in terms of temp etc. but I wouldn't count on that every year going forward….

Would be the right job to mix in a half tonne of humic acid when agitating to try and hold on better to your p

it’s expensive

There's farmers on the facebook groups worldwide making their own from lignite and I think potassium hydroxide. More a southern hemisphere thing. If you can buy a bag of lignite for 15 euro and a drum of KOH for 40 then it shows how these others make money. Lack of volume in sales and lack of competition means they drive margin to the rafters.

Burn them the 12th of July and say the unionists burned them. Or the the 21st of June and say your after turning pagan.

It's gas, the eating david above got for spreading slurry 12 hours early. The shite you would get for snaring badgers, or burning bush's.

And the funny thing is that it's farmers that are their own biggest critics. MEPS on 1/4 million/year don't have to worry about the laws they make as, its the fellow farmers that instead of supporting each other, will make an issue out of it. Not talking about you bass

Got word a dairy farmer in the next village is giving up milking cows this year and going at drystock.

He would have been around the same size herd wise as me and just a few years older. Seems the generational dairy farmers under 100 cows are just disappearing. Go on twitter though and you are told to shut up and it's the greatest farming enterprise going both by the women milking and those not milking. Team dairy has to be blindly enthusiastic about milking or else you are not representative of the "industry". I think the most enthusiastic though have jobs on the side and others doing the actual work. Farmer in question would have been a big buyer of straw for bedding of the cows. With all the costs gone up not just of straw, you'd imagine the good was going out of milking for them. Chance for a second life and lifestyle for them now though.

Still a bit of a downer but it's a personal decision for them obviously.

Was chatting someone recently bedding 100 sucklers on straw. No slats at all. 18k on straw.

There'll be a tillage and beef finisher now giving out about the price of suckler weanlings and petitioning the minister to do something about it.

The weanlings that is.. not the straw.

Funny world. And that's a yearly wage for some.