Fodder Shortage 2018

ithastopay said:
I wonder how much extra fodder was needed for the country?
How many on here are or were short of feeding?
Media like to sensationalise a story, during the recent snow, a TV crew were doing a piece, a dairy farmer I know very well was asked to do an interview on camera, they wanted him to tell a sad story of the hardship he was enduring and how he was dumping milk, as the milk truck couldn't get to his farm, none of which was true he didn't do the interview.

I'm well aware that there have been and are some tough situations on farms in the past few weeks, I'm not having a go at anyone, however I wonder if it could've been avoided with a bit of forward planning earlier in the winter, or could it be avoided completely if farms had an extra bit of fodder as an insurance for a bad year.

We all pay insurance for farm, tractors, car etc, a necessity and worth having. However it's dead money.
Having a bit of extra feed is "stock"
stock that be turned back into money again.

I understand fully that there are areas in the country that have always relied on a portion of fodder being brought in from other areas.

We have had two fodder crises in 5 years, areas that traditionally always had enough got caught short, what's the problem? Over stocked, underfunded?
Poor advice or bad decisions by farmers themselves.
Click to expand...
Our winter here started the 4th of September when we had to start buffering cows at milking, the weather turned very wet after a wet month previous and our low lying land was very wet, we fed 80 bales before the 20th of October which is usually the start of the winter feeding. It's been non stop since. Noticed we were tight so bought 50 bales in February. The last 10 days cows are up to 8.5kgs of meal and out as much as possible. They are milking very well and increasing every collection. Our average calving date was the 10th of March due to AI issues before that, glad in a way it was later, we used calve mid January but never again, it makes no sense to calve a heap of cows and they inside for the first 6-8 weeks. I'll cut extra silage this year, grow a few acres extra maize and contemplating 6 acres of beet. Many reasons for this crisis, weather and too many cows, mainly too many cows. We have a weeks fodder left, hopefully that will see us out.
 
ithastopay said:
I wonder how much extra fodder was needed for the country?
How many on here are or were short of feeding?
Media like to sensationalise a story, during the recent snow, a TV crew were doing a piece, a dairy farmer I know very well was asked to do an interview on camera, they wanted him to tell a sad story of the hardship he was enduring and how he was dumping milk, as the milk truck couldn't get to his farm, none of which was true he didn't do the interview.

I'm well aware that there have been and are some tough situations on farms in the past few weeks, I'm not having a go at anyone, however I wonder if it could've been avoided with a bit of forward planning earlier in the winter, or could it be avoided completely if farms had an extra bit of fodder as an insurance for a bad year.

We all pay insurance for farm, tractors, car etc, a necessity and worth having. However it's dead money.
Having a bit of extra feed is "stock"
stock that be turned back into money again.

I understand fully that there are areas in the country that have always relied on a portion of fodder being brought in from other areas.

We have had two fodder crises in 5 years, areas that traditionally always had enough got caught short, what's the problem? Over stocked, underfunded?
Poor advice or bad decisions by farmers themselves.
Click to expand...

This is the first year in as long as i can remember we havent a carry over of 50 to 100 bales of silage, no extra stock and no less silage made, winter came 6 weeks early and is a month late leaveing, very hard to forward plan for that,
 
I would say most farmers are cutting lighter crops nowadays compared to even 10 years ago ,sure all we hear out of teagasc is you lose 2 dmd every day for delayed cutting and to go for quality over quantity .As the majority of silage is now made in bales ,this also tend to be lighter crop and lads dont like to have too many left over .In fact a good few careful farmers who would be top class operators ran out of silage and these lads would not be overstocked because they went for quality over quantity and expected to have cows out at least in the last week of march .Plenty of more farmers cut not get a second or third cut done last year so they were short even before the winter started early .I would think our only saving grace in this fodder shortage was that good quality rolled barley fodder stretcher was available at affordable price all winter .I shudder to think of the outcome of this spring only for all the fodder stretcher rations that were used all along the winter!!!
 
It mightn't be a popular thing to say but is it right that the government stepped in with grants to help what were in a lot of cases dairy farmers who had expanded their cow numbers too quickly?

The tillage man is having a bad year every year at the moment and gets nothing. The dairy farmer has a bad couple of months and they immediately get government support. Average dairy incomes for 2017 were over €90k.
 
ithastopay said:
I wonder how much extra fodder was needed for the country?
How many on here are or were short of feeding?
Media like to sensationalise a story, during the recent snow, a TV crew were doing a piece, a dairy farmer I know very well was asked to do an interview on camera, they wanted him to tell a sad story of the hardship he was enduring and how he was dumping milk, as the milk truck couldn't get to his farm, none of which was true he didn't do the interview.

I'm well aware that there have been and are some tough situations on farms in the past few weeks, I'm not having a go at anyone, however I wonder if it could've been avoided with a bit of forward planning earlier in the winter, or could it be avoided completely if farms had an extra bit of fodder as an insurance for a bad year.

We all pay insurance for farm, tractors, car etc, a necessity and worth having. However it's dead money.
Having a bit of extra feed is "stock"
stock that be turned back into money again.

I understand fully that there are areas in the country that have always relied on a portion of fodder being brought in from other areas.

We have had two fodder crises in 5 years, areas that traditionally always had enough got caught short, what's the problem? Over stocked, underfunded?
Poor advice or bad decisions by farmers themselves.
Click to expand...
I am fortunate in that I am not overstocked and in most years get away with a 4 month winter, all housed mid November and out mid March onwards, I would have enough silage for a 5 month winter so approx 25% more than needed. We had so much rain and snow up to February the odds were that it would be fairly dry for a month or so and I bought in about 30% of the yearlings I would normally buy in the spring as I figured I had enough silage to carry everything into early April and grass would be available by then based on previous experience, trouble was grass didn't grow and even the lighter stock that I could usually have out mid March had to be housed into April and still are, ran out of silage last Tuesday week and have been buying in since, I have found out one thing, what people will tell you is good silage is in most case fairly shite and they just want rid of it but want a lot more than it's worth ( really poor silage is worthless but can command a higher value in years like this ). Looking forward I can see difficulty in replacing stocks of silage, closing date is going to be back a few weeks and come the end of may grass will want to turn to stem so it's the old quandary of quality V bulk and the only way bulk will be achieved is by running cutting dates well into June, maybe we will be lucky and nature will compensate with a bumper grass year and a short winter ahead but I do know that being 5 weeks late going to grass will probably cost me approx 25kg dead weight on each animal or approx €100/hd.
 
ithastopay said:
I wonder how much extra fodder was needed for the country?
How many on here are or were short of feeding?
Media like to sensationalise a story, during the recent snow, a TV crew were doing a piece, a dairy farmer I know very well was asked to do an interview on camera, they wanted him to tell a sad story of the hardship he was enduring and how he was dumping milk, as the milk truck couldn't get to his farm, none of which was true he didn't do the interview.

I'm well aware that there have been and are some tough situations on farms in the past few weeks, I'm not having a go at anyone, however I wonder if it could've been avoided with a bit of forward planning earlier in the winter, or could it be avoided completely if farms had an extra bit of fodder as an insurance for a bad year.

We all pay insurance for farm, tractors, car etc, a necessity and worth having. However it's dead money.
Having a bit of extra feed is "stock"
stock that be turned back into money again.

I understand fully that there are areas in the country that have always relied on a portion of fodder being brought in from other areas.

We have had two fodder crises in 5 years, areas that traditionally always had enough got caught short, what's the problem? Over stocked, underfunded?
Poor advice or bad decisions by farmers themselves.
Click to expand...
No amount of forward planning is going to cater for winter starting 6 weeks earlier than normal and continuing for 6 weeks later than normal. We are only buying in now as cows still in by night when normally they would be out full time, mostly, after calving. That's 2 months extra feeding for a third of the herd here. Same stock numbers as normal and an extra 15% of silage made last year.

I've seen this said a good few times and tbh I do find it insulting. Are people so quick to forget the absolute deluge of rain that fell from the middle of September last year up to two weeks ago? Is one fine week enough to wipe out the wettest winter in my memory?

Apparently so:confused3:
 
Agreed Rusty, simple as is this year was the perfect storm, and very hard to be fully ready for. If it wasn't for the really late spring I think the country would of got by, assuming a better effort had been made to get fodder from the east to the west and north.

In many other non grass based counties much bigger feed reserves are kept (such as with maize/grain in the US), this is easier to do due to the higher feed density, alongside the big economy advantage of leveling off big harvests/low demand etc. Contrast that to trying to hold over 2years worth of grass silage stocks, 1stly you will have to pay the likes of 300/ac to grow/harvest this extra silage, bales will not keep nearly as well so you need more capital in silage pits etc (and the smaller the silage pit the worse the economics of it are).

Moving forward the only real practical solutions to avoiding a repeat of this is if you know you are in trouble in jan take some action then, by a combination of reducing stock and stretching out fodder, there is no point throwing caution to the wind and hoping for an early spring. But equally so it would be too cautious to attempt back then to stretch everything out into may if in almost every other year previously you don't need fodder after say March.

The main failing of the government in this crisis was not accepting afew week earlier that there was an impending fodder crisis, Creed denying there was a problem up until the last minute was farcical and showed he completely lacked empathy with farmers on the ground who were experiencing great mental strain with the harsh spring and compete bewilderment as to how their stock would be fed in the following weeks.
 
Rusty Spade said:
No amount of forward planning is going to cater for winter starting 6 weeks earlier than normal and continuing for 6 weeks later than normal. We are only buying in now as cows still in by night when normally they would be out full time, mostly, after calving. That's 2 months extra feeding for a third of the herd here. Same stock numbers as normal and an extra 15% of silage made last year.

I've seen this said a good few times and tbh I do find it insulting. Are people so quick to forget the absolute deluge of rain that fell from the middle of September last year up to two weeks ago? Is one fine week enough to wipe out the wettest winter in my memory?

Apparently so:confused3:
Click to expand...

You've had a winter 12 weeks longer than normal.
That's tough and difficult to deal with, what's your normal date for winter housing and turnout.
Around here there's very few in any bother, we housed cattle to finish last summer, this was being done irrespective of the weather, we housed the stores about two weeks early and turnout is about a week or two weeks later than average over a number of years.
The tradition around here would be to have more than enough feeding.

It's not my intention to directly or indirectly insult you or anyone else. I'm giving my opinion on how things look from where I am.
We're well used to less than ideal weather around here, winters are longer, spring is later, weather opportunities are less for doing our work on the tillage side of things.

I certainly am not forgetting the wet weather, it broke for us the last weekend in July, the harvest was tough, finishing in October, October and November was a very difficult time here struggling to get crops planted.
This spring is late, but it can and will be managed.
We are farmers, we make decisions we adapt and change as we have to, the most important thing is to have options.
Those milking cows have fewer options, unlike a beef farmer who can easily sell stock, or feed some on a bit harder to finish earlier, the dairy cow has to be kept, milked and fed.
I don't claim to know much about dairying, or what fodder is needed to keep a cow for a winter, I would imagine that €100/cow would provide a good bit of extra feeding for a bad winter like this.
Maybe I'm wrong and it would cost a lot more than that?
One thing I do know is the problems of this winter are going to be ongoing into 2019 for many farmers.
 
There are lads caught here that were never caught before.

I'd be the cautious type and will only scrape out after feeding extra meal and straw and getting out a few smaller cattle earlier.

I dont think this is the time for finger pointing, it's a case of getting everyone through this and we can catch our breath and start preparing for next winter.

Oh and one final note. The first person next june/July to say its too dry or hot is getting a belt of a steel bar!!!
 
At the risk of getting a belt of the steel bar the last thing we need is a hot dry summer.
A few days of it every week or two would be nice but if we don't get regular rain silage stocks will be hard to build up.
We must be well up on rainfall amounts so a dry period is likely.
The wet and windy may saying is very true.
It's hard to imagine us wanting rain at the moment but the time will come
 
Seedsower said:
At the risk of getting a belt of the steel bar the last thing we need is a hot dry summer.
A few days of it every week or two would be nice but if we don't get regular rain silage stocks will be hard to build up.
We must be well up on rainfall amounts so a dry period is likely.
The wet and windy may saying is very true.
It's hard to imagine us wanting rain at the moment but the time will come
Click to expand...
Somebody give me that man's address :fight::boat::oops2:
 
Seedsower said:
At the risk of getting a belt of the steel bar the last thing we need is a hot dry summer.
A few days of it every week or two would be nice but if we don't get regular rain silage stocks will be hard to build up.
We must be well up on rainfall amounts so a dry period is likely.
The wet and windy may saying is very true.
It's hard to imagine us wanting rain at the moment but the time will come
Click to expand...

A few heavy showers here today. Grand for a while 3 to 5 pm ish. Was over in Portlaoise visiting an elderly neighbour in hospital. Grass has come on a sight yesterday and today. A few cattle appearing in fields. Mainly sucker cows and calves. Saw only 1 field ploughed , I think. Not much silage stocks left now.

I must be 1 of the few farmers glad to see today's rain. I took the ball on the hop and ordered 2 loads of lime from the local quarry. It was delivered Wedneday evening and the lad spread it on Thursday morning. Fields were bareish, ground ok to travel , and now rain has it washed off , so I can.let the cows onto it.
 
Mf240 said:
There are lads caught here that were never caught before.

I'd be the cautious type and will only scrape out after feeding extra meal and straw and getting out a few smaller cattle earlier.

I dont think this is the time for finger pointing, it's a case of getting everyone through this and we can catch our breath and start preparing for next winter.

Oh and one final note. The first person next june/July to say its too dry or hot is getting a belt of a steel bar!!!
Click to expand...

If your going to give anyone a belt of a steel bar make sure to use a hollow one.
 
Mf240 said:
Oh and one final note. The first person next june/July to say its too dry or hot is getting a belt of a steel bar!!!
Click to expand...

Peter said:
If your going to give anyone a belt of a steel bar make sure to use a hollow one.
Click to expand...
@Peter , you seem to remember the story of the man local to myself and @Mf240 .
He would have got legendary status after that episode. 2 men whose idea of a holiday would be a 10 hour day.
 
Seedsower said:
At the risk of getting a belt of the steel bar the last thing we need is a hot dry summer.
A few days of it every week or two would be nice but if we don't get regular rain silage stocks will be hard to build up.
We must be well up on rainfall amounts so a dry period is likely.
The wet and windy may saying is very true.
It's hard to imagine us wanting rain at the moment but the time will come
Click to expand...
+1 it happened in 2013 where badly damaged ground hardened like concrete and nothing grew up through it.
 
jf 850 said:
@Peter , you seem to remember the story of the man local to myself and @Mf240 .
He would have got legendary status after that episode. 2 men whose idea of a holiday would be a 10 hour day.
Click to expand...

2 savages to work at one time.

The two of them set sail from home (laois tipp border and went to a sheep mart in Clare on a little tractor with no cab and small livestock trailer. They bought two load and one lad went with the first load behind the tractor and the other lad walked the second load to athlone and met the other lad on the way back.
 
houlie87 said:
This is the first year in as long as i can remember we havent a carry over of 50 to 100 bales of silage, no extra stock and no less silage made, winter came 6 weeks early and is a month late leaveing, very hard to forward plan for that,
Click to expand...
Surely the having the 50 or 100 usual carry over was the forward planning itself @houlie87 .
 
jf 850 said:
@Peter , you seem to remember the story of the man local to myself and @Mf240 .
He would have got legendary status after that episode. 2 men whose idea of a holiday would be a 10 hour day.
Click to expand...

I do indeed a similar episode happened locally here but it was a calving jack used instead of a hollow bar.
 
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