Dealing with winter fodder deficits and a shortage of bedding materials were the main topics of discussion at the Irish Farmers Journal fodder demo on the first day of the Ploughing. The demonstrations are taking place at 11am, 1pm and again at 3pm.

At the first demonstration on Tuesday, Aidan Brennan said that the fodder deficits were very localised, with mostly farmers south of the line from Limerick to Dublin the worst affected.

“The national picture is around a 10% deficit of winter feed on farms. Some farms are much worse than this while other farms are fine, so it’s very localised depending on stocking rates and rainfall,” Brennan said.

The advice was to do a fodder budget early and plan ahead for what meals are needed as supply will be tight.

“If you need to feed meals to stretch silage then it's best to do it early in the winter, before things get really busy in the spring. A 5ft shear grab will hold about 1.1m3 of silage, which works out at about 200kg of silage dry matter. This will feed around 20 cows along with 2kg of meal.

“It’s important to restrict silage if feeding meals, otherwise the cows will eat all the silage and eat all the meal and just get fat,” he said.

On the issue of bedding, Peter Varley said that with forage scarce, more farmers are going to use straw for feeding instead of bedding. On top of this, straw supplies are back compared to other years with poorer crops and shrinking tillage acreage.

Varley says the alternatives to straw for bedding are woodchip and peat, but that the floor slope and surface would want to be good for peat, otherwise it will get wet very fast.

“Peat has an absorbency of 10 times its weight while woodchip has an absorbency of 2.5 to four times its weight, while straw has an absorbency of 2.4 times its weight," Varley said.

Cost wise, he said if bedding weanlings for six weeks, straw will cost €112, peat €60 and woodchip €87.