Improving beef ration with wholecrop beans

Home-grown spring beans have cut the cost of the beef ration on a Northumberland farm by halving the use of straw and cutting out feed-grade urea. Ann Hardy reports.

Buying cull cows as they leave the suckler herd in order to finish them at a better weight and grade comes with its perils, and moving them through the system at speed and at a limited cost is the most important goal.

For brothers Martin and Richard Grix, who have such a system at Hillhead Farm, Morpeth, Northumberland, producing a consistently high quality, iow cost ration is the central pillar on which their profits depend.

Ensuring as much of the rarion is home-grown as possible is key to securing good margins, but the brothers have also found this gives the business a security they have not been able to achieve with bought-in feed.

Reliant

Martin says: “With bought-in feed, especially when you use by-products, you can suddenly get the phone call which leaves you high and dry, so we want to become as reliant as possible on what we can grow ourselves.”

Such a phone call came only four months ago when the supply of waste fruit, which had been a key ingredient of the ration for many years, suddenly disappeared.

“Our supplier lost the contract and the fruit we fed to the cows now goes to anaerobic digestion, but we were lucky we were already in the process of extending the range of feeds we were growing on-farm,” he says.

The most recent feed to be added to the cows’ ration has been homegrown spring beans, introduced for the first time in 2016.

“We had been working with Kelvin Cave for many years and their northern area manager, Michael Carpenter, had been trying to convince us to grow beans for wholecropping for some time,” says Mr Grix.

“He felt bean silage would suit our system well, as it would provide forage and protein which could replace some of the straw and feedgrade urea we were buying.”

With 1,500 cows going through the system every year, even the farm’s 300 hectares (750 acres) of arable cannot supply all the straw the cattle required.

Mr Grix says: “We tried beans for the first time when we bought a small standing crop which we ensiled as wholecrop silage on top of a clamp of crimped cereals. We liked what we saw from the little we had and felt the cattle on the bean ration came through with a better finish.”

The following year the brothers decided to add beans to their own arable rotation and were pleased the crop would also help their compliance with the Basic Payment Scheme’s greening rules at the time.

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