Allocating grazing

However, he says getting the grazing allocation exactly right has been a steep learning curve. “With robots, you must have enough grass for the first and last cow,” he says. “Give them too much and they don’t come into the robot as often as they should; and give them too little, and they come in too often.” Farming 240 acres (97ha) owned plus 150 acres (61ha) rented on a mainly grassland farm, he says the milking herd has access to around 200 acres (81ha) of grazing adjoining the dairy.

There is no buffer feeding throughout the summer, and ‘no time to put feed in a wagon’. This means the summer ration comprises just grazing plus concentrates in the robot, with grass silage usually the only forage through the winter months. “Last year we added maize to the rotation because of a grass shortage the previous summer,” he says. And although it helped the farm out of a short-term forage shortfall, Adrian doubts he will grow the crop again, due to its growing costs and lower protein, which he has balanced by increasing the protein in the winter concentrate from 16% to 21%.

This means all the more importance is attached to grass silage, which is the mainstay of the operation and is analysed every month to ensure the ration is carefully balanced. However, over the years, its quality has posed challenges, and Adrian recalls: “I was never really happy because of the waste on top and the overheating.” With only one huge clamp which accommodated every cut and all the farm’s forages, he was anxious to find a more consistently reliable way of retaining feed value and avoiding losses across a wide feed face.

Activator+CA

“We’ve tried additives from loads of companies over the years, but have never found any we’ve been happy with,” he says However, a conversation with Tim Frost, Kelvin Cave’s representative in South Wales and also a neighbour with whom Adrian keeps sheep on tack, led him to try Activator+CA, a silage additive which combines high concentrations of an elite strain of Lactobacillus plantarum with citric acid. “It’s a unique combination which has been proven to achieve the rapid reduction in pH required for a stable lactic fermentation, good forage palatability and a high retention of nutrients,” says Tim. “We first tried it around five years ago, and it lifted our grass silage ME [metabolisable energy] from 10.6 [MJ/kg DM] to 12,” says Adrian. “Since that year, ME has never dropped below 11.5 and the silage appears really stable, without any heat at all.”

Sticking with the product for both grass and maize, he says the wide face of the clamp and the addition of up to four cuts of grass and one crop of maize, have truly put the product to the test.

And although it’s proven to be equal to the challenge, he says there are still things he’d like to improve in his silage making.

“Everything is done by contractors which means we have to rely on when they can come, which isn’t always exactly when we’d like,” he says. “We’d like to cut every five or six weeks after first cut at the end of May and we’d like to wilt for longer to achieve a higher dry matter.”

However, he says he is much happier with the new system and with the time it has freed – not only for his own outside work but for that of his daughter Sally, who also combines working on the farm with being a firefighter, supplying boxed milk to seven local vending machines and TB testing on two days a week.

Whether part-time farming will become a future for the industry remains to be seen. But for Adrian and his family, a combination of improved grazing management, top quality forage and robotic milking have made it a success on Fforest Farm.