Just kale.
Q. What did you choose that crop?
It's animal friendly as far as, if you put fodder beet in and they break out, they can get acidosis and die quite quickly. With kale they can get nitrate poisoning, but it's less likely. So it's sort of a safer crop. You don't get as much tonnage, but it's also easier to grow because I could buy a seed drill to plant kale, but to buy a fodder beet drill is way over our budget.
Q. Is it under irrigation?
No. If it’s super dry when I sow it, I'll run the irrigator over it to help germinate the seed, but that's all it gets.
Q. How were your crop looking entering winter including weed burden?
Really good. I’m really happy. Hardly any weeds.
Q. How do you utilise your winter crop?
On the kale, we feed 240 cows breakfast, lunch, dinner. I move the fence a step at breakfast, a step at lunch, and a step at dinner, and then every Monday I put out 16 or 20 bales of hay and every Friday I put out 20 bales of hay, and it takes them four days to eat that. So, yeah, the goal is to always have hay in the feeders in the morning. They stay on the kale until they're two weeks away from calving.
Q. How has the management of your crop changed?
This is our fourth winter and it depends on the winter but we're getting away with murder at the moment, aren't we? We could wear jandals in this crop paddock. One thing I have figured out is that sometimes a smaller mob is not actually better. They're just trudging up and down the fence because there's hardly any cows in there. You're hardly moving the fence at all. Whereas when you've got more cows, you can give them a good whack [of kale]. I give them three metres a day, and so we're getting quite a lot of food in one hit but still getting the same amount overall. We've tweaked our system to give us the best result in the crop paddock, which is making my life a whole lot easier when I go to plough it and re-sow it.
