With every new silage season, it seems more farmers and AD growers are contracting out the harvesting operations. The benefits are easy to see, someone else has to worry about all that expensive kit and find the drivers, plus you should benefit from a more timely operation. There are always two sides to every coin and the negatives of using silage contractors can persuade farmers to continue making their own silage. The usual concern involves you standing in the yard in perfect conditions whilst the contractor is refusing to pick up the phone or keeps promising “tomorrow, definitely tomorrow”. 

So how can you have your cake and eat it - how can you get what you want from your forage contractor?

As with most things to do with making silage, it’s all about the planning. Start early and discuss exactly what you expect. This benefits both you and the contractor, at the end of the day this business relationship has to be good for both of you. Any one sided contract, with only one winner, is not going to be repeated and ultimately a good contractor is one you have a great relationship with.

So a good contractor / grower relationship needs both parties to be realistic about what they can get out of this. As a farmer you want the best price because making silage is a massive part of your feed stock production and has a direct impact on the bottom line for the business. But you also want to be top of the list when the sun comes out and the crop is ready to ensure you make great silage from this forage.

As a contractor, these two requirements are not comfortable bedfellows. Put yourself in their position for a moment, one of your customers is paying £10 per acre less than everyone else, yet they are the ones who a shouting down the phone at the last minute demanding you get the harvester on the farm within the hour. Now unless you really really need their business, you are going to prioritize the farmers who pay a fair rate and where you stand a chance of covering your costs.

As a farmer, be realistic about the rate and make the life easier for the contractor, that way you move into the premier league of customers for the contractor whilst paying division one wages.

So what do you need to do to make yourself a good customer?

Get the plan sorted, and this should include all the basics such as the area of each grass cut, target dates and who will be supplying what bits of kit. But to get the best out of your contractor, go a bit further and discuss the details. Pull out the farm maps and show the contractor the areas you need cut, the potential hazards like low cables, narrow bridges etc. From this the contractor can accurately work out how much kit they will need to do a good job. Make a detailed harvest plan together, showing what blocks of land you start off with and where you move onto. Show the contractor the clamp, the access and discuss the loads from the compaction vehicles. 

Your silage clamp will be designed for a certain size of compaction vehicle – usually 8 or 10 tonnes. The chances are that the contractors “buckrake” will exceed this figure. This is the topic for another in this series but you MUST manage this situation. If the clamp collapses because it’s been overloaded, who is going to pay, and who is going to prison if someone is killed?

Give you contractor some clear targets, target dates, dry matters, chop lengths, cutting heights. Be honest about when you are going to pay the bill and how much assistance you will be able to give.

When helping isn’t helping

Should you help out the silage contractor, after all you might well have some of the kit? You can certainly reduce the bill if you undertake some of the operations yourselves, but there can also be downsides. Working within the team you might think you’re helping but actually, if you asked them to be really honest, the contractor might well prefer it if you stood back and let them get on with it themselves. So what can you do to help, surely doing the mowing yourself would be a benefit?

Mowing your own grass for silage is clearly a good potential saving and it won’t interrupt the well oiled contractor harvest gang, but, unless you have a large enough mowing output, it might not be the best thing for your silage. You only need to stand back and witness the appetite of a modern self propelled forage harvester to understand just how fast they can clear the ground. You might have plenty of time to mow the grass ahead of the chopper so there isn’t a risk he will catch you, but the silage quality will be suffering without you noticing it. If it takes you two days to mow an area that the chopper can pick up in one day, some of your grass will have been wilting for 48 hrs and some of it 24 hrs so your target dry matter will be compromised.

If we do the maths to estimate the feed losses of the less than ideal wilting, plus the fuel costs of mowing, the hours on the tractor and the depreciation of the mower, you might conclude that the contractors rate for mowing isn’t unreasonable. Add to that a risk factor where you mow it and he doesn’t pick it up when you expect – for whatever reason – and mowing your own becomes a bit less attractive.

So what else can you do?

Be prepared is probably the best answer to this question. Have the clamp ready, the sheets sorted, the drains in place and the effluent tank empty. Open the gates to the fields, check the boundaries for fallen branches and other foreign objects. A breakdown will cost the contractor in lost time and repair bills and will cost you in lost feed value of the silage and eventually in increased contractor charges, so do what you can to avoid them. If you need them, put out some road signs to warn other road users. 

Once the contractor arrives, make sure they know your harvest plan and target DM, chop lengths and additives etc. Don’t then just sit back and hope for the best, get out and monitor the harvest. Watch where they are driving, make sure they avoid soil contamination. Check the incoming dry matter and chop length and make sure they are compacting the clamp correctly.

In wet periods, be prepared to clear the mud off the road. If you’re doing your best to minimise this problem, you are much less likely to face prosecution under section 149 of the highways act and this might be a much better use of your time and efforts compared to running another silage trailer along side the contractor. 

Once the harvest is completed, conduct a review with your contractor. Start with the harvest plan, did it work, how could you improve it? Discuss the safety issues and look at how you could both improve the operations. Finally look at the silage quality and analysis. Ultimately this is a result of your joint efforts, you have grown it and the contractor has ensiled it. Be honest about the results, explain what you want to improve and discuss with the contractor what you can both do to improve your silage quality.

Put all this together and you can have your cake and eat it. If you want to discuss how you can get great service at a good price and make top quality silage or any of the other aspects of silage making covered in this series – contact Jeremy Nash @ jeremynash1@btinternet.com

To receive notification of new blogs in this series why not follow us on Facebook ?!