Out-wintered heifers are an intelligent solution
The problems are very similar, and so are the solutions.
Graham Twose has a family dairy farm just a few miles from my office.
His out-wintered heifers strip-graze turnips and silage — the kind of intelligent money saving idea which it always gives me a thrill to see. I used the video camera on his farm, and you can see the process on my www.farmideas.co.uk website.
For Graham, out-wintering his dairy heifers reduces the costs of housing and scraping and shifting muck.
Instead of the usual system of loading silage on a specially bought feed trailer, or carrying bales each day to feeders in the field, he has a method that involves no heavy lifting, no ruts and mud. In fact, the daily management is done with the pick-up or even a quad bike.
Yet the heifers are on a diet of baled silage together with strip grazed stubble turnips and ryegrass or grazing rye, a ration which keeps them growing without needing much if any supplementary feeding (other than feed blocks).
The out-wintering requires some planning and action in the summer, which is why this topic is one for summer publication. The system starts with a field that can be ploughed in early summer, after a crop of winter barley perhaps, or a second cut of silage.
The field is ploughed and sown with the quick-growing mixture of stubble turnips and rye. As soon as the seeds are sown, Graham carts silage bales into the field, putting them in a line across the field.
The field I saw was about 15 acres, and he had around a dozen 18-month heifers running with a Hereford bull.
In summer, the field is dry and easy to drive over with the bales, which are placed on their ends. As the seeds have yet to germinate, this job does no damage.
In due course, the crop can be top-dressed by driving parallel to the row of bales, and by autumn, he has a green field to strip graze, with silage bales already in place for supplementary feeding.
The daily feed routine involves rolling a round feeder which has had the base part cut off (making it easy to move) and dropping it over the next bale in line, and cutting off the bale plastic.
The electric fence is then moved up so the bale is accessed along with the fresh mouthful of stubble turnips.
The field looks pretty badly poached when the cattle have finished, but Graham does nothing with it until early spring, when it gets a roll and maybe a light harrowing with an Einbock or similar.
Add some more fertiliser, or if possible some slurry, and the grazing rye comes back into action for an early bite before ploughing and drilling spring barley.
If the rye has been only lightly damaged, it will be kept for the combine or forage harvester. The system provides an economical diet for the youngsters, which need no shelter other than the thick hedge.
