Farmer Focus: No sugarcoating how our barley fared
© Jeff Holmes I’m beginning to feel my age. Our eldest son begins his first year of primary school in two weeks.
It doesn’t seem any time at all since we left the hospital with him, tentatively strapping in the car seat.
His levels of excitement are off the scale. I wonder if this will be maintained all through school? His current career choice is to be an astronaut, so he’ll need to stick in.
But then again, don’t all five-year-old boys want to be astronauts? It certainly beats farming.
See also: Zero-grazing switch cuts dairy feed costs by 2p/litre
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It was great to get away for a week for our family holiday earlier in July.
Quality time together holds so much value, and it’s all too easy to miss out on it.
We missed nothing at home as the weather was dreadful, although I think this was the case nationwide.
I suppose it’s just nature getting back in balance after such a dry May and June.
We seem to be bombarded by the media with climate change rhetoric and I, for one, am getting fed up with it.
Hopefully, by the time you read this we’ll have finished the winter barley harvest.
Completion has been delayed waiting for Roundup to work, as there was too much grass through some of it.
A combination of missed spray timings and a wet winter has badly affected yields of grain and straw.
It’s easy to sugarcoat on these pages, but it’s awful. We live and learn, and I regret not just reseeding it last year.
The good news is the silage clamps are filling up. We seem to have fallen into the multicut system by default this year, but by luck I think we have timed it correctly.
Third cut was taken 10 days ago now, in a tight weather window, and won’t be quite as dry as hoped.
However, first-cut analysis is 35% dry matter, more than 16% protein and 12MJ of metabolisable energy, so I hope it feeds as well as it looks on paper.
This week should see the final 40ha of third cut done at our rented farm for heifers, together with 10ha of wholecrop triticale.
Any surplus from now on will be baled or zero grazed, because we’ve flung enough tyres on silage pits this year.