KALEAGE – STILL DELIVERING A TASTY FEED AND NOW IT’S GONE ORGANIC?
Two livestock farmers in South Devon, who have been friends for over twenty years, have been pooling their skills and know-how in order to fine tune several aspects of organic forage cropping – and their success can now benefit others in the industry.
The crop they have been concentrating on is kale and the story began when this well established fodder was given a complete make-over in 1995. This was the year that Ron Patey and son Malcolm decided to take a different approach to its utilisation.
What they did was quite novel because they took a crop which was traditionally grazed – and experimented with baling it. By trial and error this father and son team managed to put together a ‘blueprint’ for handing the crop in this way…and as a result many dairy, and other livestock farmers, took up the opportunity to grow Kaleage. Although he came out of dairying in 2004 Ron still grows Kaleage today but now he sells the bales with ‘added value’ because he has organic status on the fields on which it is cut and baled. One of his customers is Rory O’ Connor - a local dairy farmer who used to be a specialist advisor for the old MMB – but now runs a spring calving herd of Kiwi Friesians.
Another breakthrough with kale followed when a new ‘environmentally friendly’ way of tackling the flea beetle problem was evaluated and subsequently refined on Ron’s South Devon farm. This approach, which involves sowing a ‘decoy’ crop, became known as the Trapper Mixture.
If you e-mail us (info@limagrain.co.uk) and put “KALEAGE – THE FULL STORY” in the subject box we will e-mail you a pdf file which provides the full story along with a number of other photographs showing aspects of the Kaleage crop.
May 2010
Big baled kale silage, better knows as Kaleage, is very palatable indeed. In fact it is so attractive to dairy cows that it caused Rory O’Connor a few headaches! E-mail us for the pdf file and you can find out what the ‘problem’ was ….and how he solved it!
