Farmer Focus: Is focusing on slurry going to solve TB?

Brian May ruffled a few feathers the other night, didn’t he? But was it as bad as some made out?

I thought, based on the experiments and the data, his conclusions were valid. (Assuming of course that the truth wasn’t stretched for camera.)

As badgers have no natural predators, I think we should be controlling numbers, but that should not be our only way of controlling TB. As May’s findings suggested, we must be more mindful of slurry.

See also: Bovine TB experts have their say on Brian May’s documentary

About the author

Tom Hildreth

Livestock Farmer Focus writer Tom Hildreth and family grow grass and maize for the 130-cow herd of genomically tested 11,000-litre Holsteins near York supplying Arla. The Hildreths run a café, ice cream business and milk vending machine on the farm.

Read more articles by Tom Hildreth

If TB can be passed on in slurry, then that should be our first change to the way we work.

Obviously, splash-plating slurry onto grazing grass should be a big no-no. I’m not sure a dribble bar or trailing shoe is a lot better, especially on silage grasses.

As it grows, the grass pushes up the dried slurry into the path of the mower.

So, injecting or exporting slurry sounds like a good route to avoid contaminating grass.

Separating slurry and then spreading it with a trailing shoe should also work, as the liquid immediately soaks into the ground without leaving a residue on the leaf.

It would be a sad story to tell our children’s children, that we eradicated an entire species to get rid of a disease, but it wasn’t all caused by them anyway.

That’s my penny’s worth. I think there’s value in actively changing the way we manage slurry instead of blaming the wildlife that was living on the land long before we decided to farm it.

After the past few years, I thought we were owed an easy harvest this time. As our wheat goes into wholecrop, I buy straw by the bale in the swath and bale it myself.

I was getting five, 5ft rounds to the acre [12/ha], so I didn’t think it yielded too badly. All the baling was done by 14 August and straw led back by 19 August.

Getting the straw dry that early made a pleasant change to turning it in September. It also meant I had time to get the grass seeds in early – or most of them.

I still have 2.4ha to do, but by the time this is published, I should have that done and got the wheat in. Then we can settle into our winter routine.