วีดีโอ

Bizarro ?. I don't know if Google translate worked properly but if you are asking about the calf, the calf is female.

Hi Jay, when i watch two of my favourite tv shows ie 'Aussie Gold Hunters' and 'Outback Opal Hunters' i never imagined anyone having a problem with rushes in Australia, but i guess Australia is huge with a wide variety of terrains and climates. With our strict eco rules nowadays we would not get away with burning rushes anymore. We can't even burn branches if we trim hedges. I would love to see clover 4 foot tall. That would be real rocket fuel for the cattle.

@@OllieLove4255 G'day Ollie- I'll assume I got your name right :) It's the first year I've grown the arrowleaf clover. I'm six feet tall and the flowers were up to my shirt pocket, and that's on poor soil! It's finishing off and laid over now after heavy rain last week. I'll strip a heap of seed at the end of this week- gonna be well over a hundred degrees today so won't be doing a lot of anything. I've lived in gold country most of my life- one of my great grandfathers was one of the two Australians who found the gold at Ophir and started the gold rush. Our farm now is on the edge of a former gold mining town called Gulgong. They took eleven tons of gold from here- one of the best "leads" was only a couple of hundred yards south of our boundary. Still tons of gold left but so much underground water that they had to give up. Google "The Holtermann Nugget"- it was found a couple of miles from the farm I grew up on. I have a Minelab SC 2300 detector but mostly stick to panning. Check out The Jackson Brothers farming videos on TH-cam- they're a couple of hundred k's north of me. Good channel.

I've only baled rushes a few times and as you say it makes quite good bedding. I don't have a bale chopper so i just use the front end loader and pitch fork to spread the bales. I understand exactly what you mean about a big Matt. Been there ,done that, so i changed my system. I now clean the sheds regularly and the dung is piled and usually allowed to sit for a year or two to break down and allow plenty of earthworms to accumulate, as the soil needs them as much as the dung.

You said it. Straw is no longer cheap. It's hard to believe years ago tillage men would burn the straw in the fields after the combine. Many would laugh and say it wasn't worth their while baling it. They have changed their tune now as straw is a cash crop in itself. Thankfully i've started to use the bales of rushes already (the ones i thought were the wettest ) and they are OK. Not as good as straw but the animals seem happy enough on them.

Good video Would you consider spraying

@@jamesbrennan9591 We have sprayed rushes in the past, even the field that appears in this video. We joined ACRES (Agri - Climate Rural Environment Scheme ) last year. Spraying rushes is now a NO NO, so in the last few months we have purchased a weed wiper. Hopefully she will make an appearance on here in the springtime once the weather picks up.

We heard of prices ranging from €120 - €150 for 8x4x4 bales during the spring and early summer. God knows what the price is at the minute.

The breed of the calf is Montbeliarde. The sire of the calf is a bull called NEUTRINO.

Hi John. thanks for your kind comment. Glad to hear you like watching my videos. Our farm is just over 220 acres in size but that is Donegal acres ie it includes the good ,the bad and the ugly. The outfarm where i'm building the cattle crush was purchased almost 10 years ago. Its 85 acres but only about half of that is grazing ground. The rest is trees, shrubs, rock and moss. Quite a few farmers walked the farm when it was up for sale but they turned their noses up at it as they thought it wasn't good enough but when we seen it we fell in love with it straight away. I guess beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. As far as cattle numbers are concerned we have decreased from around 200 when we were in dairying to around the 160-170 mark today but with agriculture coming under environmental pressures we intend to lower those numbers to 120-130 in the coming years. Keep less but keep better is the objective.

That's so interesting, I should have said my father's farm was similar to yours as out of our 145 acres 45 of that was rough ground ground that could not be ploughed but the cattle and sheep grazed but for some reason the folk who purchased the farm back in the early 90s fenced off the rough ground for some reason ? Anyway the cows always liked to use the cover of the "whyn bushes" when they calved outside and many a time i would help my parents looking for them and hopefully finding both well . Take care wether been terrible up in the North East of Scotland last few weeks 😢

1000 bales is good going. I imagine your winter in Devon is a lot shorter than our winter in the north west of Ireland. 2023 will probably go down as one of the wettest years on record. I have been feeding silage during the summer and currently over half our cattle are indoors because the weather is so bad. Hopefully we will be able to get some cattle out again, but if not its going to be a very long winter. I think this year we baled 750 - 800 bales which isn't enough. We will probably have to buy silage in Spring 2024 just like we had to do this spring.

@@OllieLove4255 yes farming is all about the weather really ......last year it was way too hot and dry this year it's too wet. it's not just the extra feed you need by housing cattle early it's the straw aswell ......we buy all our straw in so we really don't like to house cattle any longer than necessary. but your right winter's aren't generally too severe down here. this was the first of your videos that i've seen but i do watch quite a few farming videos and i love seeing the different way's of doing things from one farm to another. we use a contractor to do our baling and he uses the Lely/welger baler exactly the same model as in your video there really good balers and make good solid bales. it's a shame you can't buy them anymore since agco took them over. it's a shame were not neighbors cos i sell a bit of silage and hay.......we have got cattle aswell........a few sucklers and rear there calves on sell them as stores around 2 years old on a low input system

@@geraldbeard856 I watch quite a bit of farming videos myself. I follow 'The Funky Farmer', 'Farmer P' and 'Tom Pemberton' from England along with 'I Farm We Farm' and 'Farmer Phil' here in Ireland. As you said its good to see the different ways people farm and see the different farm yards along with some of the surrounding countryside along the way. Farmer P and The Funky Farmer were in Ireland for the National Ploughing Championships this week and they went live on TH-cam last night with I Farm we Farm. There will be some good videos coming from them all shortly. I think one thing the English guys noticed about Ireland was how we have moved away from straw bedded sheds and gone for slatted sheds. Straw is now really only used in calf sheds or calving pens. The majority of adult cattle in Ireland are now housed on slats. We have 3 slatted sheds. In 2 of them cattle have access to cubicles with rubber mats on them while our newest shed (9-10 yrs old) has no cubicle access but the back of each pen is done with slat rubber for extra comfort. It can be seen in my last video where i was making cattle crush sides. We need quite a bit of slurry storage as here in North Donegal we prepare for a 6 month housing period. I know that sounds mad but that's what we have to deal with up here.

@@OllieLove4255 Aah that's interesting way of housing cattle but our problem here like many farms infact is that our farm is next to a stream and having too much slurry stored up next to a stream isn't such a great idea so by us having straw yards virtually elimanates slurry which seems to please the Environment Agency. I was talking to my neighbor last week and he's got a large dairy herd (300 cows) and his farm is next to a river and they built a weeping wall slurry pit right next to the river back in the early 1980's but the Environment Agency want for him to build a new one now at least 12 metres away from the river so he aplied for the planning permision by the way here in uk you can get a 50% grant for new slurry stores but you have to get planning permision first so anyway he like us are in the Dartmoor national park and there nitt picky about allowing new buildings or structures within the national park anyway the Dartmoor national park have turned down his aplication but they said they would allow him to build a new slurry store on the same sight but the Environment Agency won't allow that cos it's too near to the river........it's weird cos both the environment Agency and the Dartmoor national park are both funded by the government but they don't agree on things

I use a bit of everything. I stopped milking in 2017.The herd at that time was predominantly M.R.I (Meuse Rhine Issel) a dual purpose Dutch breed. I still have some of them in the herd now as suckler cows. The majority of my cows are Angus (both black and red),Hereford and Simmental. I also have a few Shorthorn. I intend to do a few videos of the livestock in the not too distant future. My aim is to breed a good cow that will produce a good calf every year and calve unassisted. Another ambition of mine is to breed an entirely polled (no horns) herd.

The baler is a Lely Welger.

@@OllieLove4255 drop table?

i'll certainly try, but i'm sure there will be some boring content along the way also.

Hopefully we will get some good weather for the second cut. I'm sure just like every year they will tell us that there is an Indian Summer on the way. You get all excited at the prospect and then it turns out to be only 2 or 3 days good days.