The weather is back to a good combination of moisture, sun, and warmth to get that grass growing again. Some second cut silage and wrapped round bales getting harvested. Tillage farmers are working to complete the combining of the winter barley. Everyone is quite pleased with the yields and the grain weight per bushel. Most of the straw is getting baled and put away also. Spring barley is following soon, a bit early due to July’s heat.  I have not seen much combining before, it was interesting yesterday to see little whirlwinds blowing the straw up 20-30 feet into the air. It was a good dry day. 

Dairy and livestock farmers are happy to see the grass growing again, but are still concerned about how much stored feed they will have for this coming winter.  Teagasc has a big push going on to encourage farmers to inventory their feed, estimate how much they will need, and make plans now to cull animals and to line up feed to buy.

Teagasc GM potato plots

Quite a variety of research goes on here at Oak Park. From plant breeding, variety trials, to genome mapping of perennial ryegrass to a GM potato study. 

Yesterday I had lunch with 2 people who are plant researchers here. Both were studying fungus diseases of food crops: wheat and potato. In order for a fungus to infect a plant, the leaf surface must be damp. The dry weather in July was great for the plants, but bad for the fungus studies! The person who worked with the GM potato study had done enough watering to last her for a while.

The GM potato study here is part of a 22-nation study of varieties that are resistant to late blight. Late blight was the disease that caused the loss of several years of crop in the 1840s and ’50s, and the famine that killed a million-and-a-half, and led to the emigration of the same number of Irish people.  http://www.teagasc.ie/crops/potatoes/gm.asp

Genetically modified crops cannot be grown in the European Union. This ‘AMIGA’ project needed special approval. There are 15 EU member nations participating. You can read about it at www.amigaproject.eu and about the potato research at www.gmoinfo.ie.

Teagasc GM Potato Study

There are informational panels by the experimental plots. To grow potatoes here, it takes up to 15 applications of protective fungicides per growing season. Total value of potato crop losses across the EU is estimated to be $1.3 billion per year. ‘We are not advocates of GM, but we are advocates of public research. We are not producing GM potatoes for production or commercial purposes. Our role is to investigate the potential negative and/or positive impacts of GM technology in regard to this specific GM variety and then inform stakeholders and the general public as to conclusions drawn based on an Irish-specific research study.’

Farmers Journal. There is a good weekly paper here, ‘Irish Farmers Journal.’ In the last couple of weeks these items caught my attention and got me to thinking.  http://www.farmersjournal.ie
• 3 August, 2013, page 7. The article is ‘July milk powers on.’ The EU dairy marketing quota runs from April 1 to March 31.
o Each nation has a quota, each coop has a quota, and each farm has a quota of quantity of fat. If the country is over quota for the year, your cooop is over quota, and your farm is over quota, you pay a fine based on how much you were over. So famers keep an eye on how they are producing this year compared to last.
o This article says that July 2013 milk supplies have been 8-10% ahead of last year. The nation was 2.6% under quota at the end of June.
o There is a report on how different regions of the country are producing, and even with the late spring, the east is making a lot of milk.
o The article wonders if some farmers will risk paying a fine of half the milk price in the fall.
o The article reports that ‘some larger operators in the east that would not be able to pay (the over-quota fine) have already switched to once a day milking to reduce supply.’

• 3 August, 2013 page 8. The article is ‘Rabobank’s Henry calls for dairy industry consolidation.’
o ‘Rabobank is the largest lender to the Irish dairy industry.’ Funding both a national dairy exporting service, and major dairy coops.
o The EU dairy marketing quota is scheduled to end in 2015. And the national goal is to make more milk and to export more dairy products. ‘..asked a sticky question about where and how is all the extra milk going to be sold?’  Under the labels of individual coops- like Dairygold? Or under the Irish national brand- Kerrygold? There was no firm answer, but the answer will vary by product.
o There are big supermarkets here from Britain and Germany. A big question is what is the source of their fluid milk, butter and cheese? These supermarkets are major buyers of product in the EU (like Walmart in the US). Will these buyers be able to tempt coops to compete with the Irish national brand in the future? 

One of the big dairy coops is now building a large new processing plant.  It is located near a new motorway (interstate highway) and near a deep-water port.  The plan is to make butter and powder for export.
• 3 August, 2013 page 14. ‘Danger to environment by Japanese knotweed is highlighted in (Senate).’
o We know this weed as knotweed or Mexican bamboo. It grows mainly along rivers and brooks. And as we learned in the floods 2 years ago, that it is transported downstream in high water, where the roots that were broken in transport easily take root in the fresh silt that was deposited.  http://njaes.rutgers.edu/weeds/weed.asp?japaneseknotweed
o Here in Ireland it is moved by seed, along the roadsides as crews trim the hedges.
o ‘This plant is included in the list of the 100 most invasive alien species of the world.’
o ‘My department is keeping abreast of initiatives currently underway in Britain using a specific insect to control Japanese knotweed.’
o I haven’t seen the plant here in Ireland, but there is a lot of it in Vermont.

This has been quite a wet week.  Some real rain that has broken the drought.  Most of the fields have greened back up.  There is still concern about the quantity of forage (fodder) that will be available for the winter. 

I attended a dairy advisor training the other day, part of it was at a dairy farm near the town of Portlaoise.  John, a young fellow who has been operating the farm for 12 years, has a larger than average farm, with about 150 mature dairy cows, plus youngstock.  He has 210 acres, all in one block (which is quite unusual- most farms have parcels spread out over quite an area.)  The land is flat, with good access to all the paddocks (for cows and equipment), with water in each paddock.

He has been planning on a 4 month winter feeding season.  This spring he, like most farmers here, ran out of grass silage and round bales.  Luckily, his neighbor had enough to sell.  Now he is thinking of having enough feed for a longer winter, and trying to build his inventory (over a couple of years) to cover 5 months. 

Friesians and Jerseys at John’s farm near Portlaoise, Ireland

The 210 A usually provides enough feed.  His farm grows grass, perennial ryegrass.  Each field will be both harvested for haylage (by a contractor) and grazed.  He is averaging about 6 ton/A of dry matter now, and has a goal of getting up to 7.  (Well managed grass in Vermont can be up over 5 T/A.  Ireland has a milder climate, with usually no snow, and cows can start grazing late in March.  The perennial ryegrass- sometimes with clover- is a real high-yielding crop.)  John has been working on getting the pH, phosphorus and potash levels a bit higher, but is having a challenge getting the levels to go up. 

John is hoping to put more cows on when the EU dairy marketing quota ends in March, 2015.  Last year, he shipped about 10,500 lbs/cow, with 3.5% protein and 4.2% fat.  (An average herd would be about 12,500 lbs/cow with 3.4% protein and 4.2% fat.)  The herd is mainly Friesian (a cousin to the Holstein), with some Jerseys and some Holstein- Jersey crossbreds (that he will breed back to Friesians).  He fed a little less than a ton of concentrate per cow last year.  And he was not feeding grain to his youngstock.  He thought he might be a little over his milk quota, so he fed lots of milk to the calves, no grain.  He has a seasonal herd, so his herd started freshening on Feb 6, and half of them had calved by the 19^th! 

6-month old calves, John’s farm near Portlaoise, Ireland

The day we were there, the cows were giving 41 lbs of milk on all the pasture they could eat and 4.5 lbs of grain.  This is a different system than we are used to in Vermont, the Irish goal is to feed that grass and keep total costs down. 

Last week I mentioned the winter barley harvest.  Now it is in the middle of the harvest, waiting for some dry weather to get out there and finish combining.  There is quite a bit of straw in the fields now, most of it in big round or the huge square bales.  I am guessing that as much of it as possible will be put under cover, because if the forage yields are low, there will be buyers looking to feed that straw.  They say that the Spring barley will be next to harvest.  Certain varieties of barley will be bought by malters who will prepare it for fermentation by brewers or distillers.  Other barleys will be used for roasting to go into the several stouts that Ireland is famous for (like Guinness), roasted barley gives it the black color and the roasted taste.  Then quite a bit of the barley will be fed to livestock, either dried, or maybe treated with proprionic acid for putting into a bunker silo. 

Topics of discussion amongst the 40 advisors were:  How to get the grass to grow?  What to do on a farm with not enough silage.  And cash-flow management.

How to get the grass to grow?  It needs rain, heat, time, fertility, and grass.  There is moisture now, and heat.  The thought was that given some time, if a farmer has fertilized, the grass will grow.  Most of the commercial nitrogen that goes on is Calcium Ammonium Nitrate, which will not be lost by volatilization (like urea can be lost).   A challenge now is the days getting shorter, and farmers are hesitant to make hay or haylage in September because they want some leaf on the grass going into the winter.  Grass stays green through the winter here.  One concern is that people do not over-graze now when forage is tight, but leave a good stubble, so that there is grass there to start regrowing, if there is no green showing, the plant has to start from square one.

What to do on a farm with not enough silage?  Line up feed to buy, or cull some cows or heifers early.  The thought was that with a shortage of feed, it hardly makes sense to keep cull cows around to put more weight on them.  Get rid of them sooner rather than later.

And cash-flow management.  Sit down with the books.  Total up income and expense for the year to date, make some estimates for the rest of the year, and see what it looks like.  Now in the fall is when income taxes for 2012 are due, so farmers will be needing cash to pay that.  And if there are open accounts from feed purchased in the spring- coops are beginning to withhold money from milk checks to pay for feed bought through them, so some milk checks are looking a bit thin now.

Ireland today, 25 July, 2013.

The last two-and-a-half weeks were declared a drought here in Ireland.  There was no rain, and temperatures were up in the 80s.  Hayfields that had been cut were not showing any regrowth, lawns were drying up.  Winter barley was ready for harvest a little ahead of schedule.  Pastures had stopped growing so some dairy farmers were beginning to feed haylage that they had just made a few weeks before.  Towns were running low on water- lower pressure at nights, and warnings to not be watering lawns, washing cars, or filling wading pools.  I saw one tractor with a wagon and a 4 foot poly cube of water, and livestock farmers were beginning to shift to their secondary water supplies. 

Big windrow of late cut hay, County Carlow.

Farmers are making more dry hay this year than they have in years. 

Drought is not a usual problem here in Ireland.   But, even as I am writing this, a little thundershower is brightening people’s moods as some moisture returns.  Today’s paper even has a blight warning for potato growers, as there is likely to be a few days of wet leaves, that would promote late blight on the spuds.  Last night there were scattered showers, folks are hoping for a good rain!

Winter barley harvest begins, Teagasc Oak Park, Ireland

The grain harvest has begun.  Here is a photo of winter barley trials being harvested at the Teagasc Oak Park center.

About Ireland.

Ireland is about the size of Maine, or about three times the size of Vermont.

The population is about 4.5 million in the Republic of Ireland (26 counties).  With Dublin, the capital having about 1.1 million people in the city limits.  Cork is the second largest city in the Republic, with just under 200,000.  Northern Ireland has about 1.8 million people.  (6 counties, part of Great Britain, Scotland is another part of Great Britain).  Belfast is the largest city in the north, with 278,000 people.  So, all together, there are 6.3 million people on this island.  This is roughly the population of Tennessee.  Or about 10 times the population of Vermont.

So, if the area is 3 times the size of Vermont, and it has 10 times the population, it is more densely populated than Vermont.  And yes it is.  Dublin is a big city, with lots of people packed in there.  But, there is a lot of open land, a lot of farm land, and back roads with not too many houses on them.  Plus there is mountainous territory and bog that don’t have anybody living there.

Vermont is roughly 80% forested, and Ireland is 10-15% forested.  Ireland had been mostly forest, then the forests were cut.  Oak went into British ships, cathedrals, and barrels.  Now there have been European Union programs to pay land owners to plant both softwood and hardwood trees and to maintain the plantations.  Softwoods like Douglas Fir, and hardwoods like ash and beech.  Thinnings from these forests are used for fuel, and they use or sell the lumber.  A friend has been thinning his ash, and figures he has enough wood in a shed to last for 5 years or so!

A first look at Irish farms.

Ireland.  In 2010, the census counted just about 140,000 farms, with an average farm size of 81 acres.  More than half the farms had beef animals.  About 11% of the farms had dairy cows.  About 11% had a mix of livestock, like dairy and sheep or dairy and beef.  About 5% of the farms had hay and another crop- maybe barley or wheat.  And another 5% had just grain. 

In the US in 2007, the census counted 2.2 million farms, with an average size of 418 acres.  Over a third of the farms had beef animals.  Just under a quarter of the farms had grain.  Twenty percent had hay and other crops, and only 3% of the farms had dairy cattle.

In Vermont in 2007, the census counted 6,900 farms.  Over a quarter had beef cattle.  Just under 20% had dairy cattle.  Only 3% had grain, mostly corn.  And 44% had hay or another crop.

More next week!

University of Vermont Farm Business Management Specialist Dennis Kauppila is working and researching in Ireland from July to December 2013. We will be highlighting his work in Ireland for the next several months. Here is his first post:

Ireland today, July 12, is having a heat wave like they have not seen in 7 years.  Yesterday’s high temperatures were nearly 90 ° F, very close to the record high in the past 30 years. 

Quite a bit different from a month ago, when the Irish government was helping to pay shipping costs to import hay and wrapped round bales from Britain and France to feed livestock.  This was a very wet, cold spring.  And it followed a wet year in 2012, so forage inventories on farms were very low.  Farmers were feeding anything they could- including straw and expensive grain rations. 

Many Irish dairy farmers are seasonal producers, drying off the herd before Christmas.  Then the herd starts freshening around the beginning of March.  So in 2013, cows were calving, and getting ready to make some milk, but on most farms, there was not enough feed.  In June, the weather came around, the grass started to grow, and cows began milking.  And haying got started.  There is still concern about the coming winter’s forage supply- will there be enough?  There was a Feed Inventory day just recently, and another one coming up in the fall, when all farmers are encouraged to measure and count what they have, in order to know they have.

I am here on a 6-month sabbatical study leave, with farm financial advisors at Teagasc, Ireland’s Agriculture and Food Development Authority.  This is very similar to our land grant college system in the US.  The plaque at the front door of Teagasc Headquarters reads, “1958 In gratitude to the government and people of the United States of America whose generosity enabled An Foras Taluntas to be founded.”  It Marshall Fund money that funded this, helping to rebuild Europe after WWII.  (Teagasc began in 1987 or so, when An Foras Taluntas (research) combined with extension advisory and ag college education.)

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend an ‘open day’ at Moorepark, Teagasc’s main dairy research center.  It was called “Irish Dairying, harvesting the potential.”  They estimate that over 8,000 people attended this day-long free event.  It was spread out over nearly 50 acres.   There were 6 main stands at the beginning, with posters and microphones.  There were up to about 50 people in a group, and each group moved from stand to stand, with about 10-15 minutes of talk from researchers at each stand.  These stands included: 

1. Positioning the dairy farm for expansion (after quota is gone);
2. Resilient farming systems for an expanding Irish dairy industry-
3. Growing more grass (for pasture and hay-haylage)
4. EBI to fuel expansion (dairy genetics)
5. Requirements to achieve 90% calving rate in 6 weeks (concentrated breeding to get concentrated calving- needed for a seasonal herd)
6. Achieving a healthy herd (cattle diseases- like IBR and…

Then there was a walk by 10 paddocks to calibrate the eyeballs for measuring the amount of grass in a pasture after grazing.  And then 6 ‘villages,’ each with 8-10 posters and a talk that you could listen to or not.  The ‘villages’ were:  Grassland, Financial Planning, Genetics and Repro, High Quality Milk, New Entrants and Expansion, and Sustainabilty.  Then there tents for Industry partners, Research to adoption, Adding value to milk.  Plus there were tours of the milking barn, and the pig production facility.  Teagasc staff were well pleased with the day, and farmers’ spirits were quite high:  finally seeing the sun and having a good portion of their first cut grass harvested after a miserable wet, cold, late spring.

The latest question circulating our group of farm business planners asks what agricultural businesses are required to carry unemployment insurance. As with any regulatory issue, we strongly recommend that you confirm your specific situation with the VT Department of Labor:    http://labor.vermont.gov/Default.aspx?tabid=55

Answer:    For Unemployment Insurance purposes  an “employer”  is defined as an entity that:      “Pays $20,000 or more in gross wages in any calendar quarter for agricultural services, or employs ten or more workers in agricultural employment, including legal aliens, during some part of a day in each of at least 20 different calendar weeks (not necessarily consecutive) in either the current or preceding calendar year”  page 3 from the guide below    

Click the link below to access the full manual: A Guide to Vermont’s Unemployment Insurance Program                     http://labor.vermont.gov/Portals/0/UI/A-26.pdf

The rain has continued and many farms are now experiencing significant crop loss and damage from flooding. Please click on this link for a step -by- step guide to filing a crop insurance claim.

How to File A Crop Insurance Claim

Pam Smith is our Extension risk management specialist:
Office: 802-349-2966
518-597-3202
Mobile: 802-349-2966
Email: pamela.smith@uvm.edu

UVM Extension Farm Viability offers comprehensive risk management planning for farms seeking to develop a strategy to identify, measure and manage the elements that pose risk to business success. See our programs page for more information on how to sign up.

Last week the VT Food Venture Center hosted a panel discussion  on contract growing. The focus of the event was to discuss the opportunities for vegetable producers entering into contracts with food processors. Contract growing is not the high margin, niche product, direct-to-consumer business model that often becomes associated  with VT “local food”. This event reflects the “scaling up” of local food. Robust food systems need lower cost/higher volume producers to provide the produce and  the food manufacturers to convert it to the final form that the market place demands. So, is contract growing right for you?

Here is short list of considerations for contract growing. At the bottom we have posted a nice legal overview of contract agriculture.

High Volume Delivery: Processors get more efficient when they can run their lines longer. A full day of product is better than 2/3 a day. Several hundred to 1/2 Ton deliveries will be the norm.

Product Specification: Processors  have clear specifications for each crop and contracts will reflect that. Expect to get paid a better price when you hit or exceed spec’s. Expect to be paid less if you can’t hit the specs. Do you have the skills to produce to these spec’s? Do you have the technology or the labor to grade out your produce according to specifications?

Mechanization in the Field: Higher volume contracts fit well with farms looking to invest in specialized equipment to grow the crops with the necessary mechanization.

Streamlined Market Communications: Working with a small number of buyers is expected to require far less communication and marketing materials compared to a business that manages relationships with dozens of buyers (or hundreds of subscription members).

Legal and Risk Planning: Contracts might require legal review. Farm owners will need to explore insurance and contingency plans to deal with the consequences of losing a crop, not hitting specs or not fulfilling the full contract.

For more information on the Legal Considerations of contract growing, click on this link to

Minnesota Extension:  Ag Production Contracts