Harvesting the Grass

A good British summertime means that we can harvest grass from our pastures ready for feeding to our animals in the winter.  The weather in recent weeks has been rather erratic in terms of sun, rain and warmth, but this has helped to bulk up our grass fields.  We have been busy this week mowing and baling our grass which should produce lovely feed full of a mosaic of natural grasses, herbs and clover.  We produce a mix of hay and silage for our cattle and sheep to eat during the winter months when the grassy pastures stop growing. To make hay, we need to have a guaranteed dry, sunny and warm spell to dry the grass in the field before packaging up in bales.

Once baled and collected up we store the fodder in our barns for safe keeping until the darkest winter months.  Silage is a different form of conserved grass and involved sealing the grass and clovers in air tight conditions.  This is usually done in silage ‘pits’ or in wrapped bales (black, white green and even pink!).  Silage can provide a more stable and weather proof way of conserving grass and also often has more nutrition in it than hay.