Silage season, followed by hay!
It was our job as kids to run the thermos and cakes and food down the paddock to keep Dad and the other farmer neighbours who had been going for days replenished.
Nowadays of course, it’s all over in a day or few. The marvels of modern machinery.
I recall all our neighbours owned a select piece of machinery each, so when combined at silage time, we all banded together to get everyone’s done.
Contractors weren’t a big thing yet, but thank God that changed!
It’s still a time of stress and anxiety, watching clouds, trying to plan getting silage off to prepare the next crop bed in time — these days it’s usually maize.
In the meantime, Dad would forget about checking the dry cows and heifers, which usually cost us a cow.
Water efficiency and crop selection has become a much bigger piece of the farming puzzle than what it was back then.
The Murray Dairy Board will hold its next meeting at Kerang, in order to visit the Kerang C4Milk trial site.
This trial site has started on some old irrigation ground, which I’m really looking forward to looking at, as hybrid croppers, weed control is something of a challenge for us. (See the story on page 8.)
Dairy Australia and our region, Murray Dairy, have invested a lot of levy funds into this research. Also, many tools to help us with the bucket science.
Last year we had a contractor spread our effluent on our maize ground prior to sowing. The Dairy Australia Effluent Calculator (you can Google that) was a big help in working out how much nitrogen we had shifted, and what the deficit for the maize needs was before investing in fertiliser.
Early September saw a little temperature spike and some unholy winds.
The temperature spike prompted us to run the fans and sprinklers in the dairy prior to summer. It’s one of those maintenance jobs we usually forget about at the end of summer until it comes round again.
Last year the sprinkler pump had seized, which wasn’t that helpful come the first hot day! Our dairy yard is covered and has fans and sprinklers on timers.
This is a large piece of our ‘managing heat stress’ puzzle. Check your heat strategy out this week, before you need it.
Happy farming!
– Rachael Napier is the Murray Dairy Chair.