End of season grass yield figures for here were a mixed bag. Partially due to my lack of diligence in measuring. But clearly a huge range in performance with our two reseeds out performing everything else by a country mile. They both received slurry and fert in the spring for silage which explains alot of the difference whereas the rest of the farm has only had lime and light coat of slurry in September. So cold turkey on the nutrients which demonstrates the kind of yield penalty I guess you'd expect in a transition to a low input system. The big question is what happens next year and what we do to ensure grass yields don't slide. I read somewhere that average grass yields on NI farms were 4T for beef and sheep and 7.5T for dairy. Not sure how true this is but be interested to hear from others who measure grass what they are yielding.
We're going into winter in a much better position than last year with some hay and silage in the shed and an average farm cover of 2166kgDM/ha over 100 acres so hopefully enough to get the sheep through the winter whilst leaving a decent residual for early regrowth in the spring but weather and ground conditions will largely determine that.
A pleasing result has been the improvement in our multicut silage swards. They've now had two seasons of heifers grazing the back end instead of a third cut and one winter of sheep grazing. The ground cover was about 60% and is now more like 75% so stock are definitely helping thicken up the sward. Improving ground cover and avoid bare soil is one of the key aims here so nice to see relatively fast improvement on this.
