a shortage of silage

Some older farmers will say that on the 1st of February you should have half of your winter feed still left in the barn. In other words the winter may still have a long way to go. I’d like to think that they are being a little on the pessimistic side. The north Devon climate is generally a mild, if rather wet and windy. On the 1st of March I do think that can at least think about the coming spring!

However with most of the lambing ewes now housed for the winter, the stack of silage bales is going down rather fast. Last summer was a tricky time to make silage and hay, June and the first half of July were very dry and the fields that we cut yielded only a light amount of grass. In late July the weather changed and there were only a few spells of weather dry enough to bale the silage.

My latest calculations are that we should just about have enough silage to get us through to the spring. I’m currently feeding about a tonne of silage a day, adn that will decrease later in the ewes pregnancy as the unborn lambs take up more of the available space inside the ewes. During the last few weeks of pregnancy the ewes requirement for protein and energy goes sky high, so we feed a high quality pellet, with the silage just there as a bit of extra bulk. So fingers are crossed that March sees some warm sunny weather, and that we can turn the ewes out with lambs at foot to a good early bite of grass.