Bog Myrtle & Peat

The grass failed when the hard weather came, and now it’s certainly time to think of feeding cattle. Of course it’s tempting to delay the first feed of winter for as long as possible for the obvious reason that I only have a certain amount of silage. At this stage of the autumn, it’s hard to tell how long I’ll need to keep feeding cows until the grass comes back. Sometimes I can stop at the end of March, but for the last few years we’ve been trapped in cold easterly winds throughout April and into May. I see from my diary that in cold years, I’ve still been feeding on May 8^th. It’s always a false economy to be tight-fisted with feeding, and I chose to work a natural and seasonally dependent system – all this variation is to be expected, but it does tug at my attention.

Sometimes my costs are very little – at other times, they’re considerably greater. Compared with my neighbours who have a much clearer and more predictable method of housing and feeding cattle for the same amount of time each winter, my system feels chaotic – they’re able to make plans with great certainty – but they’ll also pay many times over what I’m paying in order to house their cattle in a network of sheds, drainage systems, slurry lagoons and straw bedding.

My first silage bales have gone out for the winter, but I’ve been keen to experiment with bale grazing this time around. In a normal year, I pick a hard piece of ground and I use it to feed cattle all winter. I dump my bales in trailers or rings and I let the cows destroy the place. It’s ugly and it damages the ground, but it’s a pretty effective way of working which limits wastage and takes up very little of my time. At the end of a long winter, my feeding areas look like hellish bomb-sites, and while they gradually heal over the summer and cover themselves with rich, nitrogenous weeds, the impact reflects a laziness in me and a lack of attention to how nutrients are cycled and dispersed in the environment. After all, cows which are fed (and in feeding, shit) in the same place for many years at a time gradually draw all the best nutrients from the surrounding countryside and dump it all in one place. 

Even when feeding areas are changed or abandoned, you can see where they’ve been for twenty years – the soil is so enriched with cow shit and wasted silage that these places become impenetrable nettle-beds – and the conclusion is that while your good fields have all their best nutrients taken off in the form of silage, that richness is simply being dumped in such deadly high concentrations in a tiny out-of-the-way place that it can’t be used for anything more useful than docks and pinappleweed.

But I have been tantalised by videos online which show how cows are fed on bales which are unrolled like ribbons across better areas of grassland. The idea is that the benefits of feeding are spread more evenly across a much wider area – and the disadvantages similarly diluted by scale. Unrolling bales in new places everyday means that nowhere is ever trampled too heavily, and when cows waste silage by trampling or shitting on it, the existing sward is enriched by a mulch of fibre and nutrients which would otherwise have been taken elsewhere.

As a measure to improve soil-health, bale grazing seems to be a much better option – even though it’s certainly slower and more time-consuming than dumping silage in the same place every day. I also find it oddly frustrating to see quite a lot of silage being wasted by cows who only seem to want to use it as bedding, but I have to console myself that it’s for the best.

My silage was very late cut this year. I didn’t get it off until September, but the quality is pretty good. I won’t notice improvements to soil health for some time, but I can say that the birds appreciate bale grazing enormously. Because the silage is from mature grass, it’s full of seeds – and great gales of blackbirds, redwings and fieldfares are raiding the residues left over when the cows have taken their fill. I wouldn’t willingly do crows and magpies any favours, but they seem to appreciate it too – and pheasants are enjoying pecking for seeds wherever they’re found. I am pretty ambivalent about pheasants, but they are a useful proxy for black grouse, which are their native equivalents. If pheasants respond, it suggests that the niche is open – and that’s encouraging, even if it’s not being filled the bird I might have chosen.

All of this represents an improvement and an addition of interest to a chore which used to add very little to my day. And it follows the general rule that if there’s a slower, more wasteful and more awkward way to do a job (no matter how small), it’s usually to the benefit of nature.