Getting the best from very dry cereals and pulses using Kelvin Cave’s Proflake NC

There’s logic to producing your own home-grown feeds.
Ever-more challenging and unpredictable weather conditions, combined with volatile feed and fertiliser markets mean self-sufficiency is not only a smart move, but one that will keep you on top of your game.

Growing maize in one of England’s most northerly counties was always going to be a challenge. But once tenant farmer, Martin Sedgewick, put his mind to it, he found he could produce a high-quality feed on which his cattle ‘have never looked back’.

Preliminary results published earlier this year by independent silage researcher and consultant, Dr Dave Davies, have now been extended. His new data provides more compelling evidence that some silage additives are no better than using no additive at all. He explains his latest findings.

Grain maize has become an important break crop for an 11,000-acre agribusiness just north of London. All sold as feed to dairy and beef producers, we find out why it is best made and traded as crimp, rather than dried.

Convention has it that the Lune valley in northern Lancashire – sandwiched between the Forest of Bowland,  the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales – is not an area suited to growing and harvesting grain. Any cereals grown are usually wholecropped early in the season and stored as forage. And any attempts to harvest grain have often been met with disappointment in one of the UK’s highest rainfall regions. But the Norris family have never been constrained by convention.