What a dramatic year!
Boiling hot when it should have been cold ☀️ Monsoon style rain when it should have been summer. 🌧️
Frustrating for everyone’s summer seaside plans, but almost devastating for those of us trying to take in enough hay to see livestock through the winter months.
For other farms, an early heat wave meant an early crop, but as part of out wildlife schemes here at Cocklebury (protecting ground nesting birds and other young) we cannot cut our grass until July.
That was a problem this year as July was so wet that most of Wiltshire had standing water on the ground! That’s a two-fold problem for taking in a crop:
(1) The grass won’t cut well and if bailed wet will simply rot.
(2) Even if you did cut the grass, the heavy machinery does a lot of damage to the ground.
So it was a sit & wait game for us this year, and when a dry’ish’ week came along we pulled out all the stops, and some local help, working day and night to save as much grass as we could before it went over.
And our hard work paid off! We took 432 beautiful natural grass bales to keep our cattle happy this winter, and to keep Cocklebury self-sufficient!
We made an Instagram reel to summarise this year’s journey, which you can watch below.
There are also a couple of images of our bales all stacked up!
Leave a Reply