Many of our regular blog readers will remember that last year we took the difficult decision to sell our beef herd. It has been a ‘different’ type of winter here at Headon Farm with no animals to tend to on a daily basis. Despite that there has always been plenty to do!
Following the exceptionally dry start to the summer in 2018 making grass very short, farmers up and down the country were feeding their winter rations to help sustain livestock. As we have had no cattle of our own on the land since July we took the opportunity to make as much grass silage in round bales as it was predicted that feed would be short during the 2018/19 winter when the majority of cattle would be in winter housing.
However, mother nature has a way of balancing things out and we had a very dry autumn and mainly mild winter. This allowed farmers in most areas of the country to keep their stock out in the fields, thus reducing the need to provide silage when they are brought into the sheds in the winter. We thought at one stage that we weren’t going to be selling any of our silage bales! We’ve marketed them through different channels this year and thankfully have sold around two thirds of them to a variety of farmers. Some are feeding sheep, others cattle, some are local and one farmer came all the way from Liskeard for our bales!
Like most businesses, in farming you have to adapt each year and make difficult decisions in order to keep going. We can’t control the weather, but in the end it mostly works out alright!
