North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Liquorice Allsorts

Solyent Green is people! Solyent Green is people! So wailed Charlton Heston at the end of the sci-fi movie when he realised that the eponymous green wonder foodstuff didn't exactly do what it said on the tin. Silage on the other hand is pretty much just grass, save the occasional frog, pheasant and unsuspecting German camper that get swept up in the grass-cutting process. There was a time when the only winter fodder for cattle was hay. The problem with hay is that it requires plenty of summer sunshine - great if you live in the south of France, not so good if you live in the west of Ireland. Silage doesn't need any sun. The grass is collected when green, and packed tight to remove air (so it won't rot) and treated with molasses (to sweeten it to make it more palatable). In the Seventies (after Ireland joined the European Union), agricultural advisors urged farmers to build huge concrete silage pits to store that silage. The cattle would start eating from one face of the pit and would slowly eat their way through the entire pit over an entire winter. With interest rates in the high teens, many farmers incurred high debts building them, and the combination of cattle slurry and winter rain wasn't very eco-friendly.

More recently, round silage bales have become popular. They've got plenty of advantages - you don't need to build a pit, and therefore, you can take the feed to the animals rather than the other way round. The round bales are wrapped using a tractor-towed machine that wraps the bales in the same was that those machines at the airport wrap suitcases. A tight seal is required to prevent air and water getting in. And, believe it or not, there's even a bit of science to choosing the colour of the wrapping. White plastic allows too much light into the bale, causing too much bacterial growth and eventually, rot. Black-wrapped bales absorb too much heat, also leading to rot, and unhappy heifers. Green plastic seems to be the happy medium, though I wonder if combining black and white plastic (above) gives the same result, or just looks kinda cool.