Farmer Focus: Spending on slurry storage made sense to us
Dafydd Parry Jones © Richard Stanton During the spring, we emptied our slurry pit and spread the slurry lightly on most of our silage fields.
For us organic farmers, the winter cattle muck is certainly not a farm waste – it’s an asset we need to handle with care, and to use to the maximum.
This is our fertiliser to give silage fields a boost for future crops. Nearly 20 years ago, when we built the main part of our building, we invested in a system that ensured the slurry could be kept in optimum condition.
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The building was designed to eliminate any rainwater mixing with slurry. With no open yards, and a roof on the slurry pit, this could be achieved.
This initially saved us money, as it allowed us to create a more compact footprint for the building. It also kept the slurry concentrated without being diluted by water.
As a typical upland farm, our availability of appropriate fields for silage is limited. Some of our silage fields are up to three miles away from the farmstead.
It does not make business sense to carry rainwater over long distances, wasting expensive fuel and valuable time at a busy time of year.
That cost would continue on an annual basis, over many decades.
A few years after putting up the building, we invested again, this time in roofed muck storage.
This enabled us to store muck for many months in a dry, covered environment. The muck could heat up, and no rainwater could get in to drain the nutrients away.
The building doubled up as a second silage pit, so it justified the investment.
Over the years, regulations have been introduced to regulate the spreading of slurry. When we’ve attended seminars advising us on the matter, it is often suggested that the problem is not slurry, but dirty water, caused by excessive rainwater entering the system.
Managing our home-produced nutrients has never been so important.
The cost of importing the nutrients onto the farm in fertiliser form is enormous.
The hidden benefit of all this is peace of mind is that we’ve eliminated the need to continually find windows of opportunity to spread slurry on frosty mornings during winter. Over undulating ground such as ours, this could be a very dangerous job.