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

Feeding the beast, Part I

"God, I'd love a good crêpe right now!", exclaimed the man standing outside O'Brien's newsagent last Saturday. I did a double take. Thank God, it was a tourist (the same statement in a Galway accent has a completely different meaning). O'Brien's is my first stop on a Saturday morning in Shop St (on the way to breakfast). I often wonder about their clientele - I never see anyone buy a copy of any of their five tattoo magazines. They stock five types of tractor magazines and, nope, I haven't seen anyone buy any of them either.

The tractor enthusiasts are probably otherwise occupied. It's the silage season, y'see, and that means huge tractors with mowers, turners and an assortment of trailers revving at full speed along narrow country roads, trying to cut as much grass as possible in the shortest possible time. They're not just rushing to beat the weather - modern tractors cost as much as luxury cars, and most contractors work from dawn to darkness to squeeze as much business as possible into the day just to meet the repayments on their high-tech machines. You might want to consider that if you meet one on the road - they have neither the time nor the inclination to pull in (and they're probably bigger than you).

In fact, the great advantage of silage [in Ireland, particularly] is that rain isn't much on an issue at all. Making hay requires at least a week of constant sunshine, and farmers would have to wait for the dew to evaporate before they could bale it. Silage, on the other hand, is just fresh grass, and requires a lot less drying. Farmers used to pack the grass into 'pits' [basically a walled area into which the grass was dumped] - this required a dangerous manoeuvre of driving a tractor over and back across the increasing mound of grass to squeeze the air out (to prevent rotting) - every year, a few tractors would topple off pits, and a rolling two-ton lump of metal is a dangerous thing indeed. As the winter progressed, cattle would eat their way through the mound from one side. They would also generate a huge amount of slurry - hence the provision of a slatted shed - which allowed the slurry to fall through slats in the shed floor into a tank below. The farmer empties the shed by pumping the slurry into a tank and then spreading it as manure over fields.

Nowadays, many farmers bale their silage instead - as the grass is cut, it is gathered, squished into the shape of a giant cake and wrapped in plastic. (I've mentioned the science behind the wrapping before). The bales are easier to transport, and it means that cattle can be fed in the fields rather than in a shed (this is probably better for the environment too, since the slurry tends not to be so concentrated).The challenge for most farmers is to stop birds pecking holes in the plastic. Some farmers favour the Oliver Cromwell approach - stringing up a dead crow over the bales to discourage the others - but most farmers seem to paint designs on the bales (which also discourages others from stealing the bales too). There are a couple of approaches in this endeavour too (scroll down to the last picture here) but most go for simple designs, like the 'googly-eye' pictured above. But is it art?

ireland,
irishblogs,monasette

Posted by Monasette at July 2, 2005 12:58 AM