John Walton: Luck brings a few extra weeks of forage

July 16, 2010

While the rain is welcome in Cheshire, for In Your Field farmer, John Walton, the dry weather brought new challenges.

Always look on the bright side of life - it’s a saying which regularly enters my head. While it’s nice to hear the rain bouncing down outside, I secretly hope it stops by the morning. It’s so much easier to cope with 400 schoolchildren when it’s dry. How selfish is that?

It’s a long time since I’ve had such an extensive list extolling the virtues of rain. Usually by this time of year the cows are on antidepressants as they fight their way through the muddy gateways.

After years of research and planning, we’ve finally got the gateways in the correct part of the field, instead of putting them in the wettest spot.

A local newspaper recently asked me to share some water- saving tips when the hosepipe ban was introduced as we grow vegetables, as do many of its readers.

Most would never have even contemplated saving water as Manchester is renowned for being wet, so it caught me a little unaware when suddenly I needed to sound knowledgeable, or at least a little scientific.

Saying ‘well, we just hope it will rain’ wouldn’t really make the best reading.

In the end I think I pulled it off with a bit about saving as much roof water as possible for use in flushing the loos, and using some of this water on the brassicas. I didn’t mention I would ever use my bath water as no doubt sales would have plummeted rather hastily.

It’s challenging to keep enough grass in front of the cows as they have started munching their way through first-cut silage as a buffer.

By luck more than good management, we have four hectares (10 acres) of a specially-designed summer drought mix, which was sown in late April when we expected to be short of grass.

Actually it was anything left in the shed which might bulk up - forage rape, triticale and Italian ryegrass. It should give us a couple of weeks of good quality forage and keep some milk in the tank. Watch this space.

We have just put 20ha (50 acres) of wholecrop beans/triticale/oat mix into the shed, which bulked up at 24t/ha (10t/acre).

Hopefully second-cut will benefit from this rain, as it will bulk up the red clover. After all, the big shed needs filling.