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Since leaving school, Maurice Jones has spent his life working on his family's Montgomeryshire farm in the rolling hills of Mid-Wales, United Kingdom, building up the mixed farming business from 100 hectares to over 1000 hectares today. Growing a farm on this scale has taken hard work, as Maurice knows: "Market conditions have grown very tight as competition has increased. In order to make a decent profit, farmers have to be really committed to getting the most value from their land possible." Being adaptable is key to Maurice's approach to farming and he is constantly on the look-out for new ways to do things, to increase productivity. Maurice makes regular trips abroad to take ideas and inspiration from dairy farms around the world - he will soon be visiting Ukraine and the United States to learn about new practices to improve the fertility and nutrition in his herd of over 1,000 cows. Maurice runs a successful farm and one of the ways to help ensure that he will get maximum value from his land is through a very efficient silage system. He uses towers and clamps for his core forage provision, and bales the remaining third - which amounts to around 10,000 silage bales a year. Maurice says: "Baling is very important for getting silage from hard-to-reach areas where it is difficult or dangerous for tractors to go, such as hilly or steep ground. I use baling a lot when I'm tackling the outer parts of my land and any small patches of ground." Some of the big advantages of baling for Maurice are the labour efficiencies and cost savings: "When you're baling, you don't need to take a big gang of workers out onto the field, as it can be done quickly and easily by a couple of people. This is particularly important when you need to respond quickly to the changing weather patterns which we've been experiencing in recent years. I have become increasingly concerned about the impact of climate change - I haven't seen anything like last summer's flood for over thirty years." James Warne, Farm Advisor for the UK's Farming & Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG) agrees that farmers were put under more pressure as a result of last year's floods in the United Kingdom: "Many farmers will have lost crops that were either ready to be cut, or had been cut and floated away, which may have left some farmers short of silage for winter feed. There will have been a detrimental impact on the quality of any grass that was under water for any period of time, which will have led to lower quality silage being produced and therefore a drop in production from animals which were then fed the silage made from this grass." Maurice says that baling can be an important tool to help farmers cope with unpredictable weather: "Baling allows me to act quickly if severe weather is on the way. I can quickly get a small team out onto the fields to wrap bales, before the rain breaks. This is a technique that will become crucial in the future, if climate change sets in." Maurice has a few top tips of his own for producing the best silage: "On my farm, we like a high dry matter silage. To get good quality silage, it is important to compress bales tightly using plenty of bale wrap, and make sure that the forage isn't too stalky and likely to puncture the wrap. It is really crucial to make sure that the bales are gently handled - using trailers with clean floors and squeezers that allow you to lift the bales safely. By following these rules, we get very little spoilage. Poor quality silage can have a major negative impact on the nutritional health of the herd and therefore a real effect on profits." < Back to Spring 2008 Newsletter |
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