Few smells are as sweet as that of well-made hay, rolled up ready to be baled. The sweetest of all is made in May, when there’s not a cloud in the sky, grass sugars are high, and young leaves are still highly digestible.
Grass grows fastest from March to June. The farmer’s challenge is to conserve the excess with minimal loss of nutrients, to feed cows and sheep through the winter when growth is slow and the ground too wet to support grazing cattle without damage. Hay must be dried from 10% dry matter when cut, to 90% dry matter for safe storage. It typically takes 4-7 days, depending on the weather and weight of the crop. Sufficient dry spells can be hard to find in a typical British summer, especially in the wetter west where grass grows best and most livestock are kept.
Silage making instead preserves the grass by encouraging lacto-fermentation in a sealed, oxygen-free, plastic-wrapped bale or clamp, where the natural sugars in the grass convert to lactic acid and pickle it. A cow will eat 10t of this unsalted kimchi from October to March. Good silage is typically made by cutting and conditioning (bruising) the grass, leaving it for a day to dry to 30%, then collecting it with a forage harvester, which chops and blows it into a trailer running alongside. Since the 1960s, silage has progressively replaced hay making in the UK, especially for dairy cows; the risks are obviously lower and, because the grass is cut earlier, it tends to be more digestible, helping the cows to give more milk. Well-made silage can have a pleasant sweetness but will never compete with hay. Plus, the earlier and more frequent cutting poses more of a risk to ground-nesting birds like skylarks.
More sweetness beckons as we enter the thick of strawberry season. Our farm resembles a mini festival with pickers arriving and pitching their tents. Despite a sweltering week and rapidly ripening berries, we are staying on top of things thanks to a crew of returners bolstering the regular team, plus a team of nimble and flexible local youth. Our strawberries are still grown in soil, unlike over 90% of the UK crop, which is grown in rock wool in gutters or peat bags at eye height to make picking easier. I hope you can taste the difference. All the while, the cows are milking well and that makes for plenty of cream.
Image of Guy & his strawberries, at Baddaford, by Emma Stoner
Our News from the Farm posts come from Riverford. They are the digital versions of the printed letters which go out to customers every week via Riverford’s veg boxes. Guy Singh-Watson’s weekly newsletters connect people to the farm with refreshingly honest accounts of the trials and tribulations of producing organic food, and the occasional rant about farming, ethical and business issues he feels strongly about.
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