Late silage making will help reduce winter feed shortages
Making silage in mid-October will help to reduce winter feed shortages. Farmers were lucky that there are yet no regulations demanding that silage work be completed by the usual August deadline.
Growing conditions have been superb since early September, even if farming-by-the-calendar regulations had ruled chemical nitrogen application in mid-September.
Farmers had until midnight last Sunday to be out of the field with the slurry tanker slurry after their silage — that is, if they already have enough slurry capacity to comply with the nitrates regulations. Until the implementation on farms of the regulations is agreed and clarified by the Departments of the Environment and Agriculture and the farmers, that is the presumed state of affairs, and other farmers can spread up to November 1 until they have required slurry storage in place.
Presumably the latter farmers can spread slurry again from January 1, whereas farmers with enough slurry capacity will have to observe the closed period until January 12 in the most favoured counties of Zone A (Carlow, Cork, Dublin, Kildare, Kilkenny, Laois, Offaly, Tipperary Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow) and until January 15 (at the earliest) in other counties. Farmyard manure can be spread on all land up to November 1. Those are the regulations which farmers now have to deal with along with their real bosses — nature and the weather — always the final determining factor of many farm operations. Unfortunately, few EU bureaucrats who supervised preparation of these regulations, and of severe penalties for breaches, knew anything of practical farming here.
