Bog Myrtle & Peat

We took our hay in June, and the bales went into the rafters. It was a bumper crop, but it was hardly enough to fill the feed gap which yawns from November to April. In previous years, we’ve sprayed the freshly cut field with Nitrogen fertiliser. This eggs the grass on to grow again and enable a second cut before the winter comes. This grass goes into silage bales, and it means that I can supply my cattle for an entire winter from a single field.

But this year I pulled away from bagged Nitrogen. I’ve learned about the damage that artificial fertilisers can do to soil chemistry and biodiversity, and that is so inconsistent with the aims of this project that I decided to avoid them altogether in 2019 – it was an exercise in “cold turkey”.

I knew I’d pay for this decision with a drop in yield. We usually take twenty five big bales of silage off this field in the autumn. I was prepared to take a little less, but I was staggered to find that regrowth after nine weeks without fertiliser amounted to almost nothing at all. We might have been able to take ten big bales of silage, but in an economy of scale, it would be impossible to find a contractor willing to bale and wrap such a small number of bales.

Some simple sums:- My cattle eat a big bale of silage every 4 days. 25 bales will feed them for 100 days – 3.3 months.

That’s a substantial period of time to go without grass. I was staring down a chasm. Of course I could buy in silage bales from a neighbour, but I can’t reconcile this as anything more than passing the buck – outsourcing the harm of intensive grassland management to somebody else’s field. So beyond all my sanctimony, I returned to the meadow on Tuesday night and spread fertiliser. I’ll now get my silage and the winter of 2019/2020 will be covered, but not without a decent helping of humble pie.

I’ve agonised over this precise issue before – how to balance productivity against sustainability. My solution has been wishy-washy; an avoidance of truth. With this coming winter sorted, it’s time to revisit the entire structure of this project. I can do better for my beasts and the environment.