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Can Co-operation Help In A Wet Autumn?

18 October 2017

In areas suffering from the very wet autumn many livestock producers are desperately short of forage to feed their stock through the coming winter.  For arable producers the problem is how to harvest their remaining fields of cereals and get the next crops successfully planted.  A possible solution which would benefit both. would be to harvest standing crops with a forage harvester fitted with a grain cracker, and preserve the forage in a pit with urea to produce a silage “replacer” to feed stock over the coming winter.   As cattle can digest whole oats, when harvesting them there would be no need to crack the grain.

The system, is very similar to urea treated wholecrop which was a common method of conserving less mature grain crops before the development of grain crackers in modern forage harvesters.  The system therefore has a proven history of successfully preserving wet, leafy crops for stock feed over the winter.

The benefits would be a quick, single pass harvest for the arable producers and for the livestock producer a local source of quality roughage with minimal transport costs.

A summary giving details of the system is available from SAC Consulting offices.

Basil Lowman, basil.lowman@sac.co.uk

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